Banteay Meanchey, Cambodia News: Would you buy archeological artifacts from these three men ?

After receiving a complaint for fraud, Colonel Men Phirum said that Banteay Meanchey Provincial Armed Forces conducted a search together with the Royal Gendarmerie, where they detained three suspects and two vehicles, three copper statues, and some other materials. The three supposedly antique statues were being sold for $26,000.

Were the buyers detained or is it ok to buy but not to sell?

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If they were not fake artifacts, but real ones , would it be OK to sell them ?

Good questions.

Not that long ago, real (or top fake) similar size artifacts but of way better quality (considering the pic) sold for a couple hundreds.

Barang_doa_slae wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 6:50 pm Not that long ago, real (or top fake) similar size artifacts but of way better quality (considering the pic) sold for a couple hundreds.

Thai dealers had books full of photos of statues at temples and you could order any you liked. The actual temple plunderers got buttons for their work, which often shows in the damage from the crude way the pieces were removed. So maybe they were paid $20 or $50 and then after going through a couple of middlemen ended up costing a few thousand by the time it got to an antiques shop in Bangkok. Some of the same Thai dealers also had workshops near Aranyaprathet where skilled craftsmen would copy pieces and use fairly sophisticated techniques to age them. It can be very difficult to tell the real and copied pieces apart. I've often seen really senseless damage to monuments where some idiot has tried to remove a face on a bas relief, probably with a hatchet or adze or whatever, and just succeeded in fucking the thing up for a useless sliver worth nothing much.

On a related note, I'm not sure how this story was overlooked here:

The suspects were arguing with each other and became angry, and they released their anger and frustration on the ancient penises

https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50269629/t ... culptures/

John Bingham wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:22 pm
On a related note, I'm not sure how this story was overlooked here:

The suspects were arguing with each other and became angry, and they released their anger and frustration on the ancient penises

https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50269629/t ... culptures/

They say they were testing their swords on the stone phallic symbols. Amateur psychology would suggest an inferiority complex.
newsworthy/two-men-arrest-after-damagin ... d%20Lingas