Editing Brink's-Mat robbery (section)

===Counterfeit stolen gold bars===
On 21 December 1983, less than four weeks after the robbery, police in [[Austria]] arrested five men, four Italians and an Austrian, at a [[Vienna]] hotel.<ref name="19831222nytimes">{{Cite news |date=22 December 1983 |title=Austrians Seize False Gold Tied to London Bullion Theft |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/22/world/austrians-seize-false-gold-tied-to-london-bullion-theft.html |url-status=live |access-date=6 February 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120327020539/http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/22/world/austrians-seize-false-gold-tied-to-london-bullion-theft.html |archive-date=27 March 2012}}</ref> Police also recovered ten bullion bars bearing the refiner's mark and serial numbers of bars stolen in the Brink's-Mat robbery.<ref name="19831222nytimes"/>

According to the police spokesman, the bars were gold-coated [[tungsten]] [[counterfeit]]s, and therefore could not be Johnson Matthey's stolen gold bars. He said that the arrested men planned to fraudulently claim they were from the Heathrow robbery. No explanation was given as to how the counterfeiters obtained the unpublished bar serial numbers, nor the likely benefit of counterfeiting stolen property in this way.<ref name="19831222nytimes"/>