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Bottles of old and rare single malt Scotch have become increasingly popular among the rich and super rich. It is both a niche luxury investment and an attention-grabbing way to indulge opulence and excessive wealth while keeping a sense of elegance.

Each year brings a new record for the world’s most expensive whisky; sometimes each month.

Last year, a bottle of Macallan 60-year-old 1926 Scotch set a record when it sold at auction for almost US$1.9 million. Macallan 1926 is often described as the “Holy Grail” of whiskies.

That figure shattered the record set in November 2018, also for a bottle of Macallan 1926, of US$1.5 million, which, in turn, broke a record set just weeks before when yet another bottle of Macallan 1926 sold for US$1.1 million.

Not that any of these bottles, auctioned at prestigious houses from one of the most revered distilleries, were frauds, but it shows the kind of money at stake at the highest levels.

Last year whisky topped the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index that tracks the performance of luxury investments, the “objects of desire” bought by the rich, such as classic cars, wine, art, watches, stamps or coins.

It’s sparked fevered private Scotch sales, online markets, and even an emerging class of rare whisky brokers.

“This massively increasing interest in the purchase of these rare products as investments has resulted in an accompanying increase in the production of fraudulent products that are difficult to detect,” writes Cook, a professor of environmental geochemistry at the University of Glasgow, who headed the research team.