Twelve days after a big jewelry theft at the Louvre in Paris, an Israeli security company said the thieves reached out to them. According to the company, the thieves wanted to talk privately through the darknet to sell the stolen jewelry.
The company is called CGI Group. They say the thieves sent an encrypted message just five days after the robbery. The message claimed they had the stolen pieces and offered to negotiate on the darknet, but only for 24 hours.
CGI Group chatted with the person who contacted them. They say the thieves showed signs that they really had at least some of the jewelry. The thieves also made it clear they needed to move fast because they were running from police and wanted to get rid of the items quickly. They were asking for tens of millions of euros.
CGI says they passed the information to the client who hired them, and that client told the Louvre. But the company says the museum did not respond for six days. They believe that delay made the thieves lose trust and may have cost a chance to recover the jewelry. The CEO of CGI even said ego and hesitation played a part.
Before all this happened, CGI says they had already seen talk on the darknet about a possible plan to rob the Louvre. They even mentioned it in an interview months earlier. The Louvre says it never had direct contact with CGI, but the company says the communication went through its branch in Italy and probably involved the museum’s insurance side.
The robbery itself happened on October 19. Masked thieves broke into the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery and stole jewelry from the Napoleonic collection. These pieces once belonged to Empress Eugénie and Empress Marie-Louise. The total value is said to be more than 100 million dollars. No one was hurt, but several suspects were arrested, including one who tried to fly to Algeria. The jewelry is still missing.

A preliminary report into the theft found inadequate safety equipment, poor organisation and obsolete protocols at the museum.
The devices as they were installed, the alarm and security devices as they were installed on the day of the theft at the Louvre Museum, functioned properly, but that wasn't enough to prevent the robbery as security was not a priority.
