Each day ARCA is made aware of between five and fifty art crimes, and those are only the ones which are reported.  Here is a sample of headlines from the past week in art crime.

Selected Art Crimes from the week ending Dec. 1, '07:

- History’s most diversely and enduringly successful art forger was convicted last week. Shaun Greenhalgh, a failed art student, forged a shockingly diverse aray of objects from his garden shed, fooling experts for twenty years. From Assyrian tablets to contemporary sculpture, etchings to paintings to coins, he fooled the British Museum, galleries and auction houses, amassing at least 3 million pounds. The diversity of objects that he successfully forged is unmatched in history. He was caught by the excellent efforts of Vernon Rapley and his Scotland Yard Arts and Antiques Squad. Greenhalgh’s elderly parents were the fences. Greenhalgh was caught while trying to authenticate one of his forged Assyrian tablets—he had mis-spelled a word in cuneiform.

- Robert de Niro is just one of countless victims, many celebrities, of the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries scam. The gallery embezzled investment money, meant to buy art as a financial investment.

- INSIDER THEFT. Several staff including a curator from Surakarta's Radya Pustaka Museum have admitted to an internal theft racquet involving up to 13 century-old statues, after police acted on a former-staff member's report. Central Java Police said Wednesday they had recovered from a businessman's home in Jakarta five of historical statues stolen from the museum. Each statue had been replaced at the museum with fakes. The businessman has been identified only as HS and he is believed to have purchased the stolen statues from the museum staff for more than Rp 500 million (US$54,190).

- The Justice Department is urging a federal court to go easy on Iran in a legal dispute in which terrorism victims are attempting to seize valuable Iranian antiquities held by American research institutions.

- Violent thefts of paintings by Lowry across England. These included a knife-point theft last May of $3 million worth of Lowry paintings from British dealer Ivan Aird.

- NEARLY five years after it was ransacked by hordes of looters in the wake of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, the Iraq museum in Baghdad is about to open its doors again.

- A stone horse dating from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) was stolen in Xianyang, a city in northwestern China's Shaanxi Province, the/Xi'an Evening News reported on Saturday. The stone sculpture, weighing five tons, was located in a village in the Weicheng district of Xianyang, a city famous for its importance during the Qin Dynasty (221-C206 B.C.) and Han Dynasty.

- Italian city rings alarm bells over 1994 art theft. Among the paintings that disappeared from a municipal art gallery in Catania, on Sicily, were a Rembrandt and a painting by the great Italian Baroque artist Guido Reni. But what is unusual about this particular alleged theft is that it took place 13 years ago - and has only just been discovered.

ARCA recommends the excellent service provided by the Museum Security Network for compiled, in-depth information about art crime every day.