Fool's Gold (Clip) | To Catch a Smuggler | National Geographic

I'm going to need that box that's in the back. We're here to look at a box that CBP's National Targeting Center targeted this particular shipment. The shipper is an entity that's known to us; they’re a previous offender for smuggled artifacts coming into the United States. We're going to see if there's any more contraband in this particular shipment that's coming through.

It appears the box contains stone beads. There are some golden artifacts on the bottom, but I'm not going to pull it out here just because we can't afford to lose any small beads. We're going to go ahead and transport this shipment down to the Diamond District of Manhattan. And we're going to have a gold specialist take a look at the gold and determine exactly what we have because of the nature of what exactly the artifact is. We suspect it might be Bactrian in origin.

The Bactrian culture was an ancient civilization that partially overlapped what is now present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, geographically situated at the nexus of a major East-West trade route. It's a perfect blending of Greek and southwest Asian art. In 1978 and 79, archeologists excavated the tombs of six wealthy Bactrian traders known as the Bactrian Gold. The collection became a prized part of Afghanistan's cultural heritage.

Then in 2021, following the collapse of the Afghan government, the treasure mysteriously went missing, and anti-smuggling authorities around the world have been on the lookout for it ever since. How many pieces are we testing? There's a lot of little pieces, but if you can just do a sampling, that would probably be the way to go. We do run into a lot of counterfeit ancient artifacts that are meant to look ancient. They're selling them off as ancient, but they're modern made. So we just want to make sure that the artifact is the genuine artifact.

All right. So we're going to start with this piece. Yep. This one seems to have a semi-precious stone in it. It looks like part of a Maltese cross. It's interesting. I mean, this was going back. You're saying a thousand, 2000 years. Yeah. This doesn't look like it's real.