It's being widely reported across international media today that the English family who passed of sophisticated forgeries as real - and fooled some of the best in the world in the process - is getting off relatively lightly. The link above is to the Yahoo News coverage. Here's the begining of the AP story:

LONDON – An elderly art scammer who fooled museums, auction houses and galleries on both sides of the Atlantic avoided jail Monday after a judge in the north England city of Bolton handed him a two-year suspended sentence.

Police say George Greenhalgh, 84, his 83-year-old wife, Olive, and his 46-year-old son Shaun spent the better part of two decades cranking out statues, paintings and other objects and passing the sophisticated fakes off as priceless pieces of art.

All three pleaded guilty in 2002 to charges of laundering money from the sale of forged artworks. Shaun, who created the fakes, was sentenced to more than four years in jail in November. His mother received a 12-month sentence.

The family manufactured a wide range of objects, including sculptures attributed to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, paintings purportedly by American artist Thomas Moran, and gold and silver items dated to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times.

The family's assets are being split up between those they duped. Part of me is intrigued at their skill - they were boviously quite good. The other part of me is a little taken aback at how easy they got off. Seems to me that plenty of people have done much more, and much harder, time for much less.