Rosa Lyster

Advance-fee scams – sometimes called ‘Nigerian prince scams’, although they mostly originate in other countries – have become a hackneyed example of online fraud. But Blay-Miezah and his varyingly complicit associates managed to keep the con going for almost twenty years, extracting hundreds of millions from investors, despite warnings from a number of prominent people, including Henry Kissinger and Shirley Temple.

Rose Dugdale’s relative obscurity today seems like an oversight, not least because we enjoy the idea of the brilliant, charismatic art thief, even if it’s usually the product of wishful thinking. We want art thieves to be special because we want art to be special, belonging to some higher category of possession. The person who steals a Vermeer should be doing it for a better reason than to sell it on the black market, or use it as collateral in a drug deal, or ransom it back to its owners.

Diederik De Beers took full control of the distribution channels, setting prices and constraining supply to ensure that diamonds remained aspirationally expensive even as the astonishing output of the South African mines showed that they were not particularly rare. It would be a perfect story for explaining the concept of monopoly to a child. 

They are condensed versions of wealth, in the same way that an actual egg is a condensed version of food. They are objects to be stolen in heist films, fitting easily into a pocket and requiring no exposition, because even children can see that these things are worth enormous amounts of money.