As Congress and law enforcement agencies take a stepped-up approach to disrupting terrorism financing, they should consider an unexpected policy tool: maintaining funding for the arts, especially the areas of fine art and antiquities. This is because terrorism financing from the illicit sale of arts and antiquities remains a problem internationally, and effective disruption and enforcement requires American experts have unfettered access to global fine art and antiquities markets, and the knowledge necessary to be able to tell legitimate art sales from money laundering. Sustaining domestic art funding will ensure a pipeline of such experts who can serve the U.S. government at home and abroad.
Fine art is popular for money laundering not only due to the romance of being an art collector, but also because it is, in fact, quite practical. All your assets could be seized, and you would need only flee the country with a painting or two, and you could resell those paintings and start over living in luxury somewhere new. Additionally, the art market is awash with theft, forgery and, most famously, high-profile public robberies, so the criminal underworld is never far from sight.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created an Art Crime Team in 2004, which has recovered more than 20,000 items valued at over $1B. In 2020, a Congressional investigation revealed how two Russian oligarchs, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, had laundered millions through the American art market. The Rotenbergs had amassed billions from construction contracts and investments tied to the Kremlin, were under U.S. sanctions since 2014, and yet still managed to do $18M in business with U.S. art dealers and auction houses.
Currently, the United States, the UK and China account for the vast majority of the global art market. The “$28.3 billion American art market is the largest unregulated market in the world … making up 44 percent of the global total,” according to the 2025 Antiquities Coalition Financial Crimes Task Force Report. The United States can never surrender the advantage to China of controlling this lucrative market as its ability to finance organized crime and terrorism is a continually growing threat.
It’s not just the fine art world that is subject to crime – forgery, fraud, money laundering – but antiquities and cultural property as well. All these are prime conduits for criminals and terrorists to generate funds to purchase weapons, recruit fighters, and support their illegal and violent activities. War zones make antiquities even more vulnerable.
“Systematic looting in conflict zones generates the raw commodity,” said Sierra Kinsey-Lawton, a UK-based expert in art and antiquities crime. “Often by groups like [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] ISIS, who institutionalized this practice almost like a guidebook on how to fund terrorism.”
“These items then enter into a transnational trafficking network where their origins are obscured by forged documents, and passed through appointed middlemen,” Kinsey-Lawton added.
In perhaps the most widely-known example, “the al-Nabuk region of Syria is claimed to have added $36 million to ISIS coffers through antiquities trafficking” between 2012 and 2014. Jordan-based art crime expert Madison Leeson acknowledged that, once news broke of ISIS trafficking looted Syrian and Iraqi antiquities, particularly from 2011 to 2015, there was “widespread alarm” that led to policy changes and increased funding for the fight against these activities.
“As a result, the field has gradually shifted toward a more cautious and evidence-based understanding,” Leeson stated. Notably, the illicit sale of art and antiquities is not thought to make up the most significant percentage of illicit income for ISIS.
At its height in the 2010s, estimates placed the group’s daily revenue stream anywhere from $1 to $3 million per day. The Department of Treasury reported in its 2024 Countering ISIS Financing Factsheet that “ISIS maintains organizational cohesion in Syria and Iraq and has access to significant funds, estimated between $10 million and $20 million, mostly held in cash and other liquid assets.” Leeson explains that considerably more ISIS income came from other sources, including “oil, taxation of occupied territories, extortion, kidnapping, piracy, drugs and weapons sales, etc.”
Some researchers suggest the role of illicit art and antiquities trade in financing terrorism has been exaggerated, while other researchers note the secrecy that accompanies the art market culture makes it hard to determine how much it truly contributes to terrorist financing.
Even with the exact sums in dispute, “what can be said with certainty is that the relatively modest sums being made by terrorist groups are absolutely not on par with the damage that is inflicted on these artifacts and the historical and scientific record,” Leeson contended.
Recommended policies Leeson suggested to fight art crime include strengthening legal frameworks and international judicial cooperation, improving provenance documentation and due diligence requirements for auction houses, enhancing interagency and international data sharing, training and equipping market actors to identify stolen or looted objects, and increasing publicity of successful law enforcement operations (to serve as a deterrent for potential criminal actors).
“Personally, I’m a database person,” Leeson added, “So I would also encourage an increased use of databases (though this is for documented art, artifacts, and antiquities, not things looted directly from the ground).”
“One of the problems facing law enforcement is that there are simply too many databases of stolen cultural goods, which means officers need to check dozens of isolated siloes for relevant information on stolen objects,” Leeson pointed out, also noting that databases of stolen art are frequently incomplete.
“A US example is the FBI National Stolen Art File, which is a database of stolen art in the US valued at over $2,000,” Leeson wrote in an email. “It’s limited in scope because it only contains artworks valued at over $2,000, but it’s also limited because it contains no information on the details of the theft (e.g., when and where) which could help the public or other law enforcement in tracking down these objects.”
As should be clear, addressing this vulnerability requires expanding U.S. expertise in the international fine art and antiquities market. Kinsey-Lawton stressed the importance of increasing, not decreasing, funding for the arts as a solution, saying “Robust funding for the arts should be strategically directed to address this vulnerability.”
Many involved in national security in the United States likely have a romantic view of art themselves, whether it’s the local paintings on the walls of the family home to an interest in various religious art and iconography to the vast array of priceless art and artifacts available throughout U.S. museums. There should be a broad recruiting pool for people interested in specializing in art crime, and there will likely be enthusiasm that international art markets are not being abandoned to China.
Perhaps an obstacle to a more constructive view of tackling art crime comes from media misrepresentation. The art market is portrayed as an elite bastion of the global upper classes, when, in reality, experts on art crime make a point to specify that many middle class people have an interest in art or even art collecting. The average American, if asked, is probably unfamiliar with the financing of terrorism or organized crime from art crime, and would not understand the need for a stepped-up involvement in international fine art circles.
The path forward is clear: The United States must maintain and expand its expertise in the international art market. Not only because of terrorism financing, but because organized crime, cultural heritage protection, and strategic economic interests all demand it. This requires sustained funding for arts education and cultural institutions to ensure a pipeline of qualified experts, consolidation of fragmented stolen art databases to aid law enforcement, and stronger international cooperation frameworks. Whether the threat is a terrorist group looting Syrian antiquities or transnational criminal networks laundering money through auction houses, America cannot afford to cede this $28.3 billion market – and the expertise required to police it – to competitor nations. The question isn’t whether art crime deserves attention, but whether the United States will maintain the knowledge base necessary to address it.