So after all the talk about the United States largest mineral and jewelry show, the products on display plus all the other displays from private collections to museum, the show experienced its first crime!
Special agents from the Homeland Security Investigations unit received an anonymous tip about two vendors at the Gem and Lapidary Wholesalers show. They had an estimated 1 million dollars in counterfeit items! The special agents underwent a sting operation and caught the vendors red-handed. The two sellers admitted to the items being fake once under arrest.
Much of the jewelry were faking some of the largest known brands including Tiffany & Co. The two vendors are under arrest for fraud, counterfeiting, money laundering and illegal enterprise.
My first thought when reading this was how stupid do you have to be for trying to sell counterfeit jewelry at one of the most renown mineral and gem shows in the world? Did they not realize that there would be dozens of industry leading specialists from jewelry, gemology and mineralogy at the show who would be able to detect a fake gem in seconds?
Obviously they didn’t because they got busted big time! The minimum sentence they will get will probably be 25 years! Counterfeiting is a real problem, which is what I think I will do my next post on! There will not always be experts around to sort the fake from the real, so we must be educated on the topic to defend ourselves from being defrauded!