To Catch A Whisky Thief

There was a fraudster within the Scotch whisky community.

- Jonny Mccormick

We found him, and we’ve taken him out,” says Isabel Graham-Yooll with ice-cool composure. The director of Whisky.Auction in London was instrumental in exposing a forger’s scheme to defraud whisky collectors of tens of thousands of dollars. The one thing collectors and auctioneers are left to wonder: is this just the tip of the iceberg?

“He was the Rudy Kurniawan of whisky and spirits. As we’ve discovered since his arrest, this was a huge crime,” says Graham-Yooll.Kurniawan, an infamous wine counterfeiter, famously duped well heeled collectors and highly regarded auction houses with his counterfeit Burgundy and Bordeaux until his arrest in 2012.

While others revel in the presence of rare whisky, Graham-Yooll’s job is to eye each bottle with suspicion. In her line of work, some degree of paranoia is an advantage; all the better to ferret out fake whiskies hiding among the genuine articles. With two decades in the spirits trade, she has developed a sixth sense for forgeries.