Indian Police Have Charged a Cyber-Scammer Who Listed the World’s Largest Statue for $4 Billion Online as a Bogus Coronavirus Fundraiser

As countries around the world struggle to deal with the fallout
of a global pandemic, a particularly outlandish rumor swirled that
India is planning a fire sale of its Statue of Unity, the world’s
largest sculpture, to fund its fight against the novel
coronavirus.

But don’t get your hopes up: the listing posted to the online
marketplace OLX offering the nearly 600-foot-tall
monument for $4 billion was, in fact, a fake. (That price that
would have shattered the $450 million record infamously set by
Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, heretofore the
world’s priciest work—though to be fair, the buyer would have
gotten substantially more for their buck.)

Screenshots of the ad posted online show images of the colossal
artwork with the text: “Emergency! Selling Statue of Unity because
of urgent money required for Hospitals and healthcare
equipments.”

The posting was possibly satire, given that the Statue of
Unity has come under fire for its
cost. Nevertheless, Indian authorities, who are trying to
crack down on the
spread of fake information during the pandemic, have filed a
“cheating and forgery case” against the individual responsible,
according to the International Business
Times.

There’s no indication of whether or not the listing for the work
attracted any interest from well-heeled collectors looking for the
ultimate trophy. (Nothing says, “I have disposable income” like “I
bought the world’s biggest statue, located on a remote river in
India inaccessible by public transportation.”)

The immense bronze statue, by Indian sculptor Ram
V. Sutar, was unveiled in the state of Gujarat in 2018. It
depicts Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first deputy prime
minister, who helped unite India after Partition in 1947.

Despite impressive scale of the statue, the con artist trying to
sell it also overestimated its value by a full order of magnitude.
The monument cost just 29.9 billion rupees ($430 million) to
erect—a process that took four years, and involved 7,416,080 cubic
feet of cement, 25,000 tons of steel, and 1,700 tons of bronze.

The post Indian Police Have Charged a Cyber-Scammer Who
Listed the World’s Largest Statue for $4 Billion Online as a Bogus
Coronavirus Fundraiser appeared first on artnet
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