Meltdown: Rising price of gold creates new threat for museums and banks

Artworks have become more difficult to sell on, making gold an easier target

Celtic gold on display in the Celtic and Roman Museum in Manching, Germany. Getty Images

Criminals are stealing gold artefacts to melt down and sell in response to rising prices, posing a new threat for museums and banks, The National has learnt.

The increased ability of art detectives to trace and retrieve stolen paintings has pushed thieves into stealing items containing gold and also diamonds, which can be taken, stripped down and easily sold to unscrupulous dealers.

Over the Christmas period, up to €90 million ($105.5 million) worth of cash and valuables, including gold, were stolen from deposit boxes at a bank in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in an “Ocean's 11-style” heist in which thieves drilled through a vault wall from a neighbouring car park.

A hole in a wall of the vault of a Sparkasse bank branch in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, after thieves broke in on December 30, 2025. AFP

In September, a 3,000-year-old bracelet was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and melted down. The next month, six gold nuggets worth approximately €1.5 million were stolen from the Paris Natural History Museum.

An ancient gold artefact that was stolen from a museum in the Netherlands. Reuters

In January, thieves used explosives to blast their way into the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, which was hosting an exhibition of priceless Romanian jewellery made from gold and silver.

The year’s highest profile heist took place at the Louvre in Paris, with jewels worth €88 million taken, including an emerald necklace set with more than 1,000 diamonds – which was gifted by Emperor Napoleon I to his second wife – along with other treasures described as being of “inestimable” value.

“A combination of the impact of the internet and digital photography makes it so much easier to identify rapidly stolen artworks when they reappear in the market,” James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel at The Art Loss Register, told The National.

Drents Museum in the Netherlands. AFP

“If you think back 30 years, you could steal a picture in Paris, take it to Brussels and sell it at auction days later, and probably there weren't that many photos of it. There wouldn’t be that much information about it.

“Whereas now, once something's stolen, it can get reported to us, and then if it turns up in any auction houses we work with, we'll flag it up. So you just can't realise the capital out of it.”

Mr Ratcliffe, whose background is in archaeology, said there are a “number of museums which have suffered gold thefts”.

Gold prices are currently almost $2,000 an ounce higher than they were a year ago, and Mr Ratcliffe believes the two can be tied.

An ancient gold bracelet that was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Photo: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The price of gold soared by more than 60 per cent in 2025 to a record high of more than $4,549 (£3,378) an ounce, before falling in the final week of the year to about $4,330 on New Year's Eve.

“I think it is very much tied to the gold price as well. If you think about the risk-reward element of this, over the last year, the reward side has almost doubled, but risk has remained exactly the same. So the calculation is fairly straightforward.”

Ratcliffe said thieves are likely to make off with low profile items that won’t attract too much attention.

“If I was planning this sensibly and I had the option of stealing two different gold objects, I'd go for the one that had the least cultural significance.

Gold nuggets were stolen from the Natural History Museum in Paris. AFP

“If I can get away with it and people are not too peeved, versus the entire world waking up to the shock news, then you go for the one that doesn't get the hue and cry.”

But Arthur Brand, a Dutch art crime investigator, said the trend of stealing gold from museums has been building for the past decade, rather than being tied to the immediate surge in the value of the metal, which has consistently had a high price in that time.

A gold nugget on display at the Natural History Museum in Paris. AFP

“It’s been going on for 10 years. Before that, we saw mostly paintings stolen from museums, but you cannot do a lot with a stolen painting. You cannot cut it in two or three,” he told The National.

“In the world of crime, people watch each other, they read the news and they copy the others. So if they can go for gold, they will do it.

“It’s sad, because for most of us, these have a historical value. But these guys just want a new Mercedes.”

Mr Brand said that in most cities in Europe, particularly London and Antwerp, there are traders willing to buy gold and diamonds without too much interest in their origin.

“In most towns today in Europe, you can go and sell your gold. In some there are people in the front, they have to take passports, but there have always been one or two who don't ask questions,” he said.

“So if you know somebody in the field who will look the other way, then you can pull it off.”

When it comes to protecting the items, Mr Brand said it was unfair to criticise museums when thefts take place.

“Every museum has been a victim of theft, maybe twice, three times, and everyone will in the future be a victim again. We don't want to have armed guards because we don't want to have shootings in a museum.”

He suggested that museums can protect their artefacts by taking a few simple steps to make it more difficult for thieves to escape.

“First of all, the display class should be thicker, and they shouldn’t have glass doors. Also, many places have smoke that comes out when someone opens a display. There are ways to slow them down, and that's what I think is the best solution to prevent these kinds of thefts.”