Make sure the currency is real. From Barcelona, Spain's El Pais:
Art swindlers selling fake Goya get paid in photocopied bills
Two brothers from Girona who planned on swindling an Arab sheik into buying a forged Goya painting found out they were the ones who had been swindled when the 1.7 million Swiss francs they had received in payment turned out to be all in photocopied bills.
The deal:
It all began when the brothers reportedly tried to sell the sheik a forged painting by Francisco de Goya – Retrato de don Antonio María Esquivel (Portrait of Antonio María Esquivel) – for €4 million.
The transaction took place in Turin where a person who said he represented the sheik gave the brothers 1.7 million Swiss francs. In turn, the siblings called a loan shark in Girona to give €300,000 to another person in the Catalan city who also claimed to represent the sheik.
The €300,000 was to pay the intermediaries’ commissions.
But when the brothers traveled to a Geneva bank to deposit the money, they were told that the bills were photocopied fakes.
Teh stupidity - it burns... And the sheik has a good looking (but fake) piece of art and a fun story to tell around the dinner table...
