Forgeries of Russian paintings are flooding the market in unprecedented numbers, according to the former head of Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad.

Criminals are supplying a market that is being driven to record heights by Russian billionaires with yards of wallspace to fill in homes in London, Paris and Moscow, according to Richard Ellis, a specialist art crime investigator for more than 20 years. He told The Times: “As the popularity of Russian paintings has increased, criminals have seen the opportunity to introduce forgeries.”

Russian collectors are so keen to buy art with a patriotic cachet that sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s amassed more than £160 million last year alone compared with barely £8 million just seven years ago. Landscapes of the 19th century and avant-garde works of the 1920s and 1930s – notably artists such as Shishkin and Malevich – are among the forgers’ favourites.

Minor 19th-century European landscapes are purchased for a few thousand pounds and transformed into Russian paintings that can be sold for six-figure sums. Some of the fakes are so good that only scientific analysis can detect them. Such tests have revealed that Summer Day, supposedly by Alexander Kiselev, a 19th-century master, which a Russian collector bought for £70,000, was actually by Janus la Cour, a Danish artist. A forger had russified la Cour’s A Forest Road, 1883, which had been bought for £1,000. The original trees were given more foliage, Russian-style houses were substituted for a Danish farmhouse and Kiselev’s signature was added.

Catherine Boncenne, a descendant of Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967), one of Russia’s foremost women artists, said that in the past two months alone she had been alerted to ten fakes. When doubts were raised about a “Serebriakova” image of a seminude woman, it was withdrawn from a Paris sale – only to crop up again in Morocco, where it sold last month for €180,000 (£134,000).

Whereas the pastel original shows two bracelets on the woman’s right arm, the watercolour copy has only one bracelet and is on paper that the artist did not use. Experts say that it is not in the artist’s hand stylistically.

Mr Ellis has now set up The Art Management Group to combat the problem. Its leading specialists include Nicholas Eastaugh, a scientist at the University of Oxford. His microscopic analysis can reveal whether a signature applied after the creation of a 19th-century painting runs over cracks that formed as the paint aged, and whether pigments have been used that were not available to the artist.

“It’s a sort of arms race,” he said. “We have to get increasingly sophisticated in the face of the forgers’ increasing sophistication.”

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