Well Organised "Mafia" Business

The attempt to clear internet sales portal eBay of as many sellers of forged archaeological finds goes on. There is (as collectors well know) a large centre involved in the production of fake antiquities in Bulgaria. Some of the sellers of such items however are proving difficult to get rid of. As soon as one account is deleted, dormant accounts are reactivated. Some of these sellers operate from bases in the UK, where the products are lost among the numbers of material coming (their sellers claim) from legal artefact hunting on local archaeological and other ‘productive’ sites.

Christian Rizzo (near Villefranche sur Mer on the French Riviera, eBay seller "shams06") writes:

The problem with the bulgarian dealers it's that they seem are working all together (or alone with several pseudo[nym]s ) with the same fake makers ( we can find some of these fake makers on the web looking for "art foundry" in Bulgaria where they show their models ). It's why we use to see at the same time from different sellers exactly the same items. And they use the same agents for collecting the money and sending the sold items. It's why you cannot have a direct contact with the seller and why a lot of sold items never arrive to the buyer ( see the feedback of Annaatana37 for example) or when they arrive they need more than 1 month shipping because the do grouped shipping. Unregistered you can find them some time later with an other pseudo[nym], in another country but with the same items. It's a very well organised " mafia " business.

The significance of the evidence is clear to dealers and collectors - as it should be to eBay who've been happy to take money from these people for providing a sales place for their activities all these years. All know that their no-questions-asked approach favours the use of the antiquities market as a source of funding for organized crime through fraud, the selling of forgeries. Yet they still refuse to even contemplate doing anything about it. I presume they treat it as “somebody else’s problem”, nothing to do with them. Like looting of archaeological sites.