Antwerp Gold Dealers Dismantled: €10 Million in Stolen Jewelry Melted Down
Belgian and French police have dismantled a sophisticated criminal network in Antwerp that saw gold dealers melt down approximately €10 million worth of stolen jewelry sourced from home burglaries across France. Five Georgian gold and jewelry dealers were arrested in Antwerp, while five members of a Serbian Roma family were taken into custody in the Paris region, in what authorities describe as a highly organized scheme to launder stolen goods through legitimate gold trading channels.
The Investigation: A Cross-Border Operation
The investigation began in September 2025 when the French Gendarmerie received intelligence about a Serbian Roma family based in Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, who were purchasing stolen jewelry from burglars operating across France. According to Het Laatste Nieuws, the family bought stolen goods from burglars across the country, paying in cash before funneling the jewelry to Antwerp.
An Antwerp-based intermediary would travel two to three times per week to the Charleroi region to meet the French family and collect the stolen merchandise. Once in Antwerp, the gold was tested, melted, and purified in facilities operated by Georgian dealers near Antwerp Central Station, on Vestingstraat and Rijfstraat — streets at the heart of the city’s famous diamond district. The end result: gold bars that could be resold on the open market, their criminal origins erased.
The Scale of the Operation
In less than one year, the network processed approximately 80 kilograms of stolen gold. The soaring gold price amplified their profits dramatically. Gold rose from €81,000 per kilogram in early 2025 to a record €143,000 per kilogram in February 2026, meaning the criminal profit is estimated at €10 million.
One suspect, represented by lawyer Kris Luyckx, remains in custody pending a chamber council decision on June 3. Another suspect was released after questioning. The Antwerp public prosecutor’s office has declined to comment on the ongoing investigation, which has been divided into three parts. Investigators are particularly focused on understanding how the Georgian dealers obtained enough cash to pay €10 million to the French family.
A Pattern of Gold Laundering in Antwerp
This case is far from isolated. Antwerp has long been a hub for stolen jewelry being melted down and resold, a pattern documented over many years. In 2021, federal judicial police raided four jewelry stores in Antwerp and Kontich, seizing over 45 kilograms of gold, jewelry, and diamonds, along with expensive watches and hundreds of thousands of euros in cash.
The most infamous example remains the 2016 Kim Kardashian heist in Paris, where the mastermind confessed to selling her melted gold and diamonds in Antwerp for over €25,000. French and Belgian officials believe the booty was bought by Georgian fences.
More recently, in early 2026, police in Avignon and Liège arrested 14 suspects for fencing stolen jewelry from France, Spain, and Portugal. And the connections to broader organized crime are striking: a British drug gang laundered €150 million in drug money by buying gold bars in Antwerp’s Georgian milieu, then reselling them in Dubai. Antwerp drug criminal “Frank de Tank” set up a money laundering circuit using a luxury watch dealer near Central Station.
Antwerp’s Diamond District: A Vulnerable Ecosystem
Antwerp has been at the heart of the world’s diamond trade since the 16th century, with wholesalers trading nearly $25 billion worth of stones annually. But over the last 30 years, the city has struggled to contain a growing underworld of hundreds of gold and jewelry shops run largely by people of Georgian descent, according to police, prosecutors, and court documents from Belgium and France.
Georgian traders began settling in Antwerp in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many had a background in metals trading and deep links with the city’s Jewish diamond traders. There are now some 300 jewelry shops operating just outside the diamond district, of which a quarter are estimated to be involved in fencing stolen product, according to Antwerp police sources.
As one Antwerp police officer told Reuters in a recent investigation into the city’s jewelry underworld: “You clearly have two worlds here. Those who work hard, are legal … and are struggling to survive, and those who apparently do good business in the same neighbourhood selling the same products.”
Regulatory Struggles and Enforcement
Efforts to regulate the sector have met with mixed success. In 2017, then-Mayor Bart De Wever (now Belgium’s Prime Minister) pushed a decree mandating security cameras with facial recognition in jewelry shops. Jewelers appealed, and a compromise was reached where cameras were installed but never turned on. The decree was revoked in 2020 after a state auditor said it risked overreach and conflicted with privacy laws.
In 2021, Antwerp formalized a specialized police force to oversee the diamond and jewelry sectors. A mayor’s office report warned of “a strong link between fraudulent jewellers and the criminal drug environment” and suspected “laundering of millions of euros in criminal proceeds.”
Broader Implications
This case reinforces concerns about Antwerp’s vulnerability to organized crime infiltration, not just in gold laundering but across the broader criminal ecosystem. The city is already battling drug gangs using Europe’s second-largest port to import multi-tonne shipments of cocaine. An anonymous Antwerp judge recently published an open letter stating Belgium was on the cusp of becoming a narco-state.
The connection between gold laundering and drug money laundering suggests a deeply interconnected criminal economy in which legitimate trading channels are systematically exploited. The EU law enforcement agency Europol oversees the “Pink Diamond” network, a secure channel uniting investigators specialized in high-value thefts, and Belgian police received alerts through this network after the Louvre heist in October 2025.
What’s Next
The chamber council will decide on June 3 whether to continue the detention of the suspect represented by Kris Luyckx. The investigation continues, with authorities seeking to understand the full extent of the network and how the Georgian dealers accumulated the massive cash reserves needed to sustain their operation. Whether this case leads to broader reforms in Antwerp’s gold trading sector — or further arrests — remains to be seen.
As one police officer noted, the city’s jewelry district operates as two parallel worlds: one legitimate and struggling, the other apparently thriving on criminal proceeds. This latest dismantling suggests that the gap between them may finally be narrowing.