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

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 rep