Most lucrative art fraud by a female

On 16 September 2013, Glafira Rosales (Mexico) pleaded guilty in the Manhattan Federal Court, New York, USA, to nine counts of fraud in taking part in a scheme to sell more than 60 works of forged abstract and Impressionist art – allegedly by the 73-year-old American-Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian – for more than US$80 million (£50 million). The artist was paid only a few thousand dollars for each masterpiece, forging fake works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. The ageing techniques and stated provenance were so convincing that art houses, museums and the art-buying public were taken in by the forgeries. By late 2013, despite on-going investigations, Rosales is the only person to have been indicted, and Pei-Shen Qian is now said by prosecutors to have returned to China.