Art student scam

The art student scam is a confidence trick in which young people pretend to be art students and try to sell mass-produced prints, which they represent to be paintings of their own production. In several early instances of the scam the sellers represented themselves as Israeli art students, but the scam is international with instances reported of Chinese, French, Chilean, and other nationalities pretending to be art students and the scam being reported in Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand and the United States since at least 2000. The art is often sold door-to-door, without the need for sham exhibition sites or art stores. In the early 2000's, "agents of the DEA, ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service documented some 130 separate incidents of 'art student' encounters" across the United States, which raised unproven allegations of Israeli spying.

Israelis

North America

Allegations of espionage

News outlets in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in Seattle and Vancouver, reported young people posing as Israeli students selling art in the region as early as the summer of 2000. Reporters Brit Hume and Carl Cameron, in a Fox News Special Report, first reported the possible connection between the 'art students' and alleged Israeli spying in a programme discussing broader allegations of Israeli espionage.. In the 2000-2001 U.S. version the 'art students' reported to be from either the University of Jerusalem or the fake Bazala Academy. Other stories referred to false claims to be studying at the Hebrew University or the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and to be raising money for art supplies or scholarships, or to be students from an Israeli kibbutz on an exchange with the University of California Berkeley.

After the scam hit many facilities and private homes of staff members of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the DEA suspected an espionage program. Both the DEA and the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive released reports about the suspicious behavior of supposed Israeli art students. The latter distinguished between two possible groups: "One group has an apparently legitimate money-making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group." The 60 pg. DEA report stated that the 'art students' entered secure areas of government buildings and several military bases, including two with stealth aircraft and other secret operations, and took photographs. The internal DEA report was leaked in 2001, and was the basis of the media coverage. Several dozen Israelis in their twenties, including supposed art students, were deported for undertaking paid work not allowed by their visas. The New York Times along with the Washington Post "Post hit up their go-to people inside Justice and FBI and CIA" and couldn't confirm the story, numerous officials are said to have laughed it off.

On March 6, 2002, the same day that the Guardian published an article entitled "Israeli Student 'Spy Ring' Revealed," the Washington Post reported that the United States Department of Justice described the allegations of spying as an "urban myth and the 60 pg. dea document as possibly the work of a single disgruntled employee. Salon.com, however, wrote that the nature of the memo made its authorship irrelevant, since the memo was a compilation of field reports by dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices and government facilities across the United States. The report included names, driver's license numbers, passport numbers and in some cases the Israeli military id numbers of the 'students'. Military service is compulsory in Israel; however, some of the 'students' were still on active duty and "many of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army."

Five days after the Post article, on March 11th, the investigative magazine of The Washington Times, INSIght on the News quoted a senior Justice Department official as saying "We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it." Another federal source suggested that "The higher-ups don't want to deal with this and neither does the FBI because it involves Israel." Salon also interviewed a "high-level intelligence agent" and "Washington insider" referred to Salon by what "turned out to be a veteran D.C. correspondent who has close sources in the CIA and the FBI ." The intelligence agent, codenamed Stability, claimed that the Post article was a plant by the FBI to kill the story.

Haaretz treated the spying allegations as inconclusive and noted with regards to the Post article, "Even this report was not enough to finally kill off the affair. Two weeks later, the New York Jewish weekly, Forward, published a report connecting the spy affair with the arrest in New Jersey, on September 11, of five Israelis whose behavior was defined as suspicious. The five were employed by a moving company and did not have valid work permits. According to Forward, the FBI concluded that the five were on a spy mission on behalf of the Mossad, and that the moving company was nothing more than a front. This story also died out quietly."

Israel's repeated response to claims of spying are that they are "nonsense." To this, journalist John Sugg writing in the Atlanta based newspaper Creative Loafing commented that Israel's denial was "predictable" and that "Israel in the past has belligerently denied wrongdoing until long after the truth was obvious." The ADL noted the popularity of the allegations among white supremacist and far-right conspiracy theorists, and argues that "For anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists ... a conclusion was easy to reach: the alleged spy ring was "proof" of Israel and the Jews' inherent treachery and utter disregard for non-Jewish human life."

Organized crime theory

An alternate theory to espionage is that the "art students" were connected to Israeli organised crime, known to play a major role in the Ecstasy trade in the United States. A DEA official suggested that they were engaged in surveillance on the DEA. A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington said that Israel had cooperated with the US on the Ecstasy case and although denying the spying claim said "That's not to say that there isn't any organized crime involving Israeli citizens."

Canada

The deportation of another group of Israeli art scammers from Canada in 2004, again for working in violation of their visas, generated another bout of speculation about spying, but Canadian officials said that the scam did not focus on government officials and offices. Chip Berlet commented that while the original espionage theories were possible "It strains credulity that once you have an operation blown, you’d simply recycle it." The scam recurred in 2009 in Calgary, and Warman, Saskatchewan; eight people claiming to be students from Israel, Germany and France were arrested and 100 paintings were seized by the RCMP and Border Services.

Australia and New Zealand

People posing as Israeli art students were reported in Australia and New Zealand from as early as 2003. The paintings are worth around AUD5, but are passed off as being worth hundreds of dollars. Three backpackers, an Israeli and two Chileans, were taken to court in Dundedin for the scam in 2003, but were discharged as the judge said that they were "minnows" in the organisation. They made NZ$15,000 in three weeks from the scam. The NZ Consumers' Institute suspected that an Auckland man was the organiser of the operation. A 23-year-old man was arrested in New South Wales, Australia, for operating the scam and 50 oil paintings were found in his car. An adviser for the New Zealand Consumer Affairs Ministry said that "All around the world, students from various countries are doing this". She suggested that the scam's organiser may place advertisements in backpackers’ lodges to recruit students. The scammers have also claimed to be Greek, Argentinian and French.

China

Many of the prints sold are mass produced in Asia. Sometimes referred to as "Hong Kong horrors", they are essentially posters mass-produced and printed on rough paper, making the lack of brush strokes less apparent. In a New Zealand scam, a man was believed to have travelled to Asia to purchase the prints. The approximate $200 sale price was reported to be divided up with $60 to the backpackers selling the prints, $20 to the local organizer, and $70-$110 retained by the ringleader.

In China, scammers approach tourists at popular attractions such as the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The scammer speaks English well enough to get into a conversation with the foreigner. The scammer claims to be an art student whose works are on display at a nearby exhibition which is part of the scam and sells mass-produced art reproductions at exorbitant prices. There are warnings about this scam in tourist guides.