Priceless

Crimes involving high-value unique goods, such as luxury items and works of art have evolved in one surprising way: where the lure for criminals once lay in stealing or forging such objects, it now lies in transforming them into financialized assets to obscure transactions, to launder money, or to hide wealth and evade sanctions. To unpack how this process works and how it can be prevented, PRICELESS has been launched. This major research project is led by Dr. Christoph Rausch, Associate Professor at Maastricht University and affiliated with the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH), among others. PRICELESS has a budget of 1.3 million euros and is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and partly by public and private partners.

While many different parties are involved in the valuation of unique goods, they each use different methods and rarely exchange relevant data, often due to privacy constraints. However, sharing information is crucial to understanding how the valuation of assetized unique goods is malleable and subject to manipulation. Where does PRICELESS come in?

• PRICELESS builds on a successful, established collaborative network between public and private partners in the Netherlands to map and mitigate associated risks of criminal subversion. 
• The project combines qualitative and quantitative research into the assetization of high-value artworks (including crypto art and NFTs) and expensive (pre-owned) watches with the promising method of financial crime scripting to reveal how (non-banking) financial services and legal arbitrage practices facilitate dangerous schemes of subversive crime. 
• Zooming in on artworks and luxury goods, PRICELESS analyses contested practices of value appraisal, insurance, and accounting, and examines how they can become corrupted. 
• Adapting innovative privacy-preserving technologies to allow for data, information and intelligence sharing between private and public organizations, PRICELESS will improve resilience through better standards, controls, regulation, and policing.