Shipwreck plunder, art among nearly 38,000 items seized in police crackdown

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It was October 2024 when a woman travelling from the sunny Mediterranean island of Mallorca to Germany was stopped by Spain’s customs police for a routine inspection. In her luggage were several seemingly innocuous items: 55 coins and a ring.

The woman told officials the items belonged to her late husband, an archeologist and diver who lived on the Balearic Islands. She intended to take the objects to Germany to have them evaluated and sold, a spokeswoman for Spain’s Civil Guard said.

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The chance encounter led to the discovery of more than 1,000 ancient and priceless items including coins, jewels, lamps and swords, some of which date back to the Talayotic culture – from 1600 to 123 B.C. – the Civil Guard said.

The couple’s daughter, who had accompanied the archeologist on his trips to recover objects, is facing charges of plundering underwater wrecks and archeological sites, authorities said. The items are being catalogued to be put on display at the Museum of Mallorca.

The case is one of nearly 260 reported as part of Operation Pandora IX – a major annual exercise supported by Interpol, Europol and the World Customs Organization. This year’s operation was coordinated by Spain’s Civil Guard and involved authorities from 23 countries, including the United States, in a bid to disrupt the trafficking of cultural items and ancient artifacts across borders.

The latest operation led to 80 arrests and the seizure of more than 37,700 items such as paintings, Roman coins and ceramics, according to Interpol. The figures, which cover findings from 2024, are a sharp increase from the previous three years, in which authorities seized between 6,400 and 11,000 items per year. In 2021, authorities seized over 56,400 artifacts, including a single haul of 27,300 items by French customs authorities.

Interpol spokesman Samuel Heath said the findings reflect a new and “highly lucrative” business for organized crime networks, which have seen a “massive watershed moment” since the coronavirus pandemic, when they became larger and more professional and expanded distribution networks.

“It was like they almost took an MBA during covid and worked out different ways of operating,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday, describing criminals innovating and evolving “at a rate that we haven’t seen before,” possibly spurred by restrictions on real-world travel and more people living their lives online.

Heath said this led to more cross-border coordination, including among groups “who you would think wouldn’t get on working together,” as well as the subcontracting of services like money laundering.

As part of the operation, Spanish authorities disrupted a criminal gang looting archeological sites in Cáceres province, near the border with Portugal, Interpol said. Police seized more than 2,000 items – mainly Roman coins minted in the Celtiberian city of Tamusia – that the group had found using metal detectors and was selling illegally on social media. Six people were arrested and three others placed under investigation, according to the agency.

In Italy, the country’s dedicated police unit for protecting cultural heritage seized a painting fraudulently attributed to renowned artist Jannis Kounellis. It would have been valued around $113,000 had it been authentic, Interpol said. A separate investigation turned up more than 300 items, including ancient coins, metals and weapons dating to Roman times, offered for sale online and discovered in a private apartment.

In Greece, the country’s department of cultural heritage and antiquities used an undercover officer to act on a tip and recover five byzantine icons being sold for nearly $80,000, leading to the arrest of three people. Ukrainian authorities also seized nearly 90 items, including coins, books and spoons, that were being illegally taken out of the war-torn country, en route to Poland, Moldova and Romania, Interpol said.

Authorities also confiscated 69 metal detectors and 23 tools used for illegal excavations.

Heath said “cultural crime” is often seen as low-risk because items can be hard to identify. Yet far from being victimless, such activity disrupts the work of archeologists and cultural historians and can affect communities through other types of criminal behaviour such as violence, corruption and fraud, he said.

“So it isn’t just, ‘OK, we’ve lost a coin, and we’ve lost a bit of pottery,'” he said, but an issue of “greater historical damage.”