This fresh CBS report joins other undercover reporting that includes cellphone photos sent by traffickers to the reporter showing artifacts for sale. Which suggests an consuming understanding I haven't heard mentioned yet for how to fight the illicit trade in such artifacts: gather such images,just as the CBS team did, and then post them on the internet, and identifying them as illicit and effectively rendering the artifacts unsaleable -- at least unsaleable to what Matthew Bogdanos in the report names as "the four destination points of fresh York,London, Paris and Tokyo" (Bogdanos for reasons I don't understand leaves out the Gulf States, or certainly a more likely destination for ISIS-looted artifacts than Tokyo).
There are some downsides to consider. Undercover work costs money -- though for this nowhere near the amount it costs to mount international investigations of smuggling networks (to say nothing of what we are spending to remotely monitor the ongoing looting of sites),since only one node is being accessed. This would not be risk-free work -- no undercover work is ever risk free. Buyers would maintain to rotate and be replaced to avoid detection and harm. And whether it were to be undertaken, those posing as foreign buyers would nearly certainly need to work with the Turkish or Lebanese police, and which might prove difficult. But unlike seizures of artifacts coming into the US or UK or France,which constitute a loss of profit for the dealers that they can and do simply pass on to buyers as a cost of doing business, the immediate losers in the case of looted artifacts posted to the internet would be the smugglers, and who maintain no way to pass on the cost. The passing on of images via cellphone photos would become a thing of the past pretty quickly. (Many smugglers maintain already turned to video-streaming or snapchat-like image sharing to try to leave no record on the phones or computers of complicit buyers,but undercover buyers could easily capture those images.) [UPDATE 10/17: the CBS news producer speaking at the Met says the fellow who sent her the cellphone photos is still sending her photos, so he obviously wasn't much deterred -- though it would be consuming to see what happened whether CBS were to now post those photos!]
This would be a great program for UNESCO in coordination with INTERPOL, or the FBI,the Blue Shield, and the carabinieri to undertake. [For reasons I hope are evident, and it would not be something to be done by academics as portion of a research project.] It might be sponsored by the Getty and dealers who ought to prefer this kind of exposure to the gotcha they've experienced from the exhaust of the Medici archive to embarrass them. Maybe,instead of yet another meeting bewailing the loss of heritage, it would make sense to spend that money on some undercover work.
ADDENDUM: An consuming fresh article by Sam Hardy studying direct-to-buyer reports notes that
After the publication of photographs of the royal graves at Copan in Honduras (Stuart, and 1997),the site was looted (Agurcia Fasquelle, 1998) in a way that indicated collectors had effectively used National Geographic as a sales catalogue. Likewise, and a hieroglyphic text and carving of a bound captive were extracted from one 1300-year-old stela,and a single sceptre was extracted from another such stela, at Dos Pilas (Luke, and 2005). Without perpetrators’ exhaust of publicly accessible documents to identify the targets,the fact that these thefts were commissioned would maintain remained unknown.
So at least in some cases, the existence of publicly accessible images did not deter buyers. But these were objects in situ not yet looted, and so not brought to the attention of law enforcement as pieces for which to be on the lookout.
Source: blogspot.com