For the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, it is “statistically inevitable” that fraud would come up at some point, the muse...

For the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, it is “statistically inevitable” that fraud would come up at some point, the museum’s No. 2 said in the wake of a decade-long, $11.8 million suspected ticket-fraud scheme revealed last week. Kim Pham, the Louvre’s general administrator, told The Associated Press that the museum’s unique scale makes it particularly vulnerable. However, pressed to name other institutions with similar problems, he declined to single out peers. “Which museum in the world, with this level of attendance, would not at certain moments have some issues of fraud,” wondered Pham, who oversees day-to-day operations, including administration and internal management. And that’s no easy task, with 86,000 square meters of space presenting 35,000 works of art to 9 million visitors a year. He framed the broader problem as increasingly digital. “Ninety percent of tickets today are bought online, on the web,” he said. “So that is where major fraud takes place.” He cited “fraudulent purchases with stolen cards” — “massively, we had that in 2023,” he said — as well as the “siphoning of free tickets” for resale and the use of fake tickets. Pham argued that visitor caps introduced after the pandemic can create scarcity that draws scammers. “When you limit the number of people who can enter a museum each day, you increase the scarcity of the ticket and that brings fraudsters,” he said, “It was like for a concert with a star — it’s when places are limited that it creates even more fraud.” https://lnkd.in/gbUHvnv6