Fraud, Scams and Fakes in Focus: The Cases That Defined 2025

Along with quarterly data stories, large-diamond finds and sparkling auction results, this year’s industry news also highlighted some of the shadier activities that take place in the trade.

Cases ranging from misrepresented lab-grown diamonds to theft, armed robbery, and stone-swapping exposed some of the trade’s more troubling realities.

Here are some highlights of this year’s swindles:

• Robbers shot and killed a security guard during an armed heist in January at Namib Desert Diamonds (Namdia). The perpetrators broke into the premises, shooting the company’s senior protection officer, who tried to protect the site. In March, Namdia recovered around $2.2 million worth of the $17.2 million in diamonds stolen. Namdia filed a lawsuit accusing the security provider G4S of failing to prevent the robbery.

• Burglars broke into Paris’s Louvre Museum in October, stealing a number of jewelry items from the collection of Napoleon and Joséphine Bonaparte. Using the freight elevator, they entered the Apollo Gallery and took nine items from the Crown Jewels of Napoleon and Josephine, among them a necklace, a brooch, and a tiara.

• In January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested four men. They were charged with kidnapping conspiracy, attempted kidnapping, robbery conspiracy and attempted extortion after they planned to attack and rob a jeweler in Florida of $2 million in cryptocurrency.

• In May, authorities arrested four of 20 suspects involved in a smash-and-grab robbery of a jewelry store in California. The alleged perpetrators stole a large quantity of jewelry from the store and exited in under 90 seconds, with five getaway vehicles leaving the scene.

• Brink’s Global Services USA finalized an agreement in February to pay $42 million in money-laundering settlements over a three year period. According to the department, Brink’s failed to identify the final beneficiary in 12 transactions between money-service businesses in San Diego and Florida, and was involved in eight cases of importing currency from Mexico to the US as an unlicensed money transmitter.

• Dubai police prevented the theft of a 21.25-carat pink diamond valued at $25 million in August. Following a tip-off, police arrested three suspects within eight hours of the jeweler reporting the theft and recovered the diamond before the thieves smuggled it out of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the Dubai Police.

• In February, New York diamond dealer Manashe Sezanayev pleaded guilty after defrauding two merchants of $460,000 by switching their diamonds for lab-grown stones.

• A New York court and the FBI charged diamond dealer Edward St. Mary III with wire fraud in May for stealing more than $3 million in diamonds from an Indian supplier. 

• A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March that claimed crypto entrepreneur Richard Heart used misappropriated investor funds to purchase a 555-carat black diamond. The SEC sued Heart, born Richard Schueler and creator of Hex, in August 2023, alleging he defrauded investors of $1 billion and spent $12.1 million on luxury items, including the 555-carat Enigma black diamond from Sotheby’s.

• In June, Pandora collaborated with Amazon’s Counterfeit Unit to bust two sellers in China who they said imported fraudulent goods. Amazon and Pandora cooperated with Chinese law enforcement, which executed a criminal raid and recovered thousands of counterfeit Pandora jewelry pieces.

Images: Some of the fraud and scam stories covered during the year. (Shutterstock/Sotheby’s/Namdia/Louvre Museum/Jewelers’ Security Alliance/Dubai Police)