- A German museum employee spent years swapping out historic paintings for fakes.
- The fraud was discovered when an appraiser checked a "frog prince" painting.
A German museum discovered one of its employees had been swapping historic paintings for fakes while doing a routine check of a "frog prince" themed artwork.
The worker, identified in court documents only as S.K., used the money he made from selling the stolen paintings to finance a lavish lifestyle, according to The New York Times. During his trial earlier this month, he told the judge in Munich he was surprised at how easy it was to steal the paintings, the report says.
That judge sentenced the man to a commuted one year and nine months in prison and ordered him to repay about $63,000, according to The Times.
S.K. was about 23 years old when the Deutsches Museum hired him as a technical employee in 2016, and he was employed until 2018, the outlet reported.
The Deutsches Museum is primarily a science and technology museum but occasionally stores artwork from private collectors, according to The Times.
S.K. operated for nearly two years, stealing early 20th century German artwork from the museum's storerooms.
His scheme finally unraveled when an in-house appraiser checked "The Frog Prince Fairy Tale" by Franz von Stuck, and noticed that the canvas was not correct, according to the report.
"In the end, it was pretty easy to recognize as a forgery," Sabine Pelgjer, a museum spokesperson, told The Times.
According to the report, S.K. took the von Stuck work to an auction house in Munich and gave it a fake name, claiming he inherited it from a family member.
The Deutsches Museum did not immediately return a request for comment from Insider.