By THOMAS ADAMSON
PARIS (AP) — 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.
A complex web of problems
Last week, Paris prosecutors said that nine people were being detained in connection with the ticket scheme. The nine have been formally charged and brought before investigating judges.
Among the suspects are two Chinese tour guides accused of bringing groups of tourists into the museum by fraudulently reusing the same tickets multiple times for different visitors, allegedly with the help of Louvre employees.
The Louvre had filed a complaint back in December 2024, prosecutors said. Investigators estimate losses of more than $11.8 million over a decade, with the alleged criminal network suspected of bringing in up to 20 guided groups a day.
With the judicial investigation ongoing, Pham declined to confirm those figures.
Prosecutors said that along with repeatedly reusing tickets, the tour guides sometimes split groups to avoid paying a required “speaking fee” — a sort of commission paid to the museum to allow them to operate.
In the last year alone, the Louvre has faced the October 2025 high-profile theft of the French Crown Jewels from the Apollo Gallery, water leaks that damaged priceless books, multiple staff walkouts and a wildcat strike last summer over poor conditions, mass tourism and understaffing.
Pressed on whether the latest case feeds a narrative of a Louvre out of control, Pham pushed back.
“Quite simply, the Louvre is the biggest museum in the world,” he said.
‘Many historical layers’
Pham described the Louvre as “a historic building that began to emerge at the start of the 13th century and has had many historical layers up to the 20th century.”
“It is normal that in this complexity we have difficulties,” he added, though he acknowledged shortcomings in the museum’s defenses.
“I won’t tell you that we do everything very well and that we did everything well,” he said. “What I’m telling you is that the fight against fraud is an action of every moment.”
But Pham stressed that it was the museum who alerted police about the case — not the other way around.
He rejected the idea that understaffing — which has been one of the reasons for multiple staff strikes in the last year — contributed to the alleged ticket reuse. “Staffing is at the right level for those functions,” he said.
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.”
The fraud case has landed as the Louvre is still dealing with the fallout from the crisis that drew worldwide attention — then October crown jewels theft in which a team of four people broke in through a window during visiting hours and fled with an estimated $104 million worth of treasures.
Authorities have arrested several suspects in that case, but the stolen items remain missing.
Pham said the Louvre tightened how many times a ticket can be validated at its multiple checkpoints.
Individual tickets are now limited to two scans and group tickets to one, he said, a change meant to prevent guides from reusing the same ticket to bring in additional visitors. The museum has multiple access points into its wings, and prosecutors allege guides exploited ticket validation to reuse the same tickets to bring in additional groups.
“For several months — and we did not wait for this moment of the investigation and the recent arrests — we carry out checks before the checkpoint,” he said, adding that checks also take place “once inside the museum galleries.”
Pham said two Louvre employees questioned in the case have been told not to return to their jobs during the investigation, while also underscoring their presumption of innocence until the investigation and proceedings are completed.
