A 75-year-old painter accused of forging works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning for a $33m fraud scheme in New York appears well placed to avoid prosecution and up to 45 years in prison, as he has moved to China.

Pei-Shen Qian was on Monday indicted on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and lying to the FBI. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan allege that he produced dozens of worthless fakes that were eventually sold by prestigious galleries for tens of millions of dollars.

Accusing Qian and a pair of Spanish art dealers of being “modern masters of forgery and deceit”, US attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement that the charges against the trio “paint a picture of perpetual lies and greed”.

The dealers – brothers Jose Carlos and Jesus Angel Bergantinos Diaz, 58 and 65 – are awaiting likely extradition proceedings, after being arrested and bailed in Spain last week. However, prosecutors could only say that Qian, who previously lived in Queens with his wife, was “believed to be located in China”, which has no extradition treaty with the US.

The Obama administration has little chance of extracting Qian, who has both Chinese and American citizenship, even if it were willing to devote diplomatic efforts to doing so, according to Professor Julian Ku, an expert on China and international law at Hofstra University.

“There is almost no chance that China would turn their own citizen over,” said Ku. “They generally don’t have a policy of co-operating, and don’t have any reason to turn anyone over, because the US won’t turn anyone over to China.”

An FBI spokesperson would only say on Tuesday: “We do hope to make an arrest, but he is in China, so …” before referring the Guardian to the US attorney’s office. A spokeswoman there said: “Unfortunately we wouldn’t have anything further to add.”

Interviewed in Shanghai by Bloomberg News in December last year, Qian said that he was the innocent victim of a “very big misunderstanding” and had never intended to pass off his paintings as the genuine works of modern masters. “I made a knife to cut fruit,” he said. “But if others use it to kill, blaming me is unfair.”

A 42-page indictment unsealed on Monday, however, alleges that he knowingly participated in a fraud plot with the Bergantinos Diaz brothers and Glafira Rosales, an art dealer who is also Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz’s former girlfriend. Rosales, 57, pleaded guilty last year to crimes related to selling 60 fraudulent artworks, and has been cooperating with authorities.

Qian, who once painted portraits of Chairman Mao for display in Chinese workplaces and schools, arrived in the US on a student visa in 1981. He is said to have been discovered by Jose Carlos later that decade as he was painting at an easel on a lower Manhattan street corner. According to the indictment, he began copying works by artists such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, and forging the artists’ signatures; then, despite knowing “they were essentially worthless imitations,” Jose Carlos would sell the copies to galleries.

By the early 1990s, prosecutors say, Qian was churning out signed fakes from his home studio in Queens under instructions from the Bergantinos Diaz brothers and Rosales. In pursuit of authentic-looking forgeries, Jose Carlos is said to have bought Qian old canvases at flea markets and auctions, and supplied him with old paint.

He also “stained newer canvases with tea bags to give them the false appearance of being older than they really were”, said the indictment, which also claimed that some works were subjected to the heat of a blow dryer, while others were left outside and exposed to the elements.

Works by other modern artists such as Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis and Franz Kline were also ripped off by Qian, according to prosecutors, who said he was found to own books and auction catalogues about the artists he copied.

They allege that throughout the 1990s, Qian was sometimes paid as little as “several hundred” dollars for each forgery, but that after spotting one of his creations priced far higher in a Manhattan art show, he “demanded more money” – and got it. By February 2008, Jose Carlos was allegedly writing Qian cheques for up to $7,000 per painting.

Far bigger sums of money, however, were involved when the trio of dealers allegedly sold the forgeries on to respected New York galleries. The prestigious Knoedler & Co, referred to as “Gallery 1” in the indictment, is alleged to have paid $20.7m for Qian’s forgeries – and then made $43m in profit by selling them to wealthy collectors. A second gallery is said to have made $4.5m selling Qian fakes that it bought for $12.5m.

Knoedler, which closed in 2011, is being sued for millions of dollars in lawsuits brought by disgruntled buyers. The gallery and its former executives have always denied committing any fraud and insisted that they made comprehensive efforts to authenticate Qian’s paintings.

The Bergantinos Diaz brothers and Rosales are accused of faking detailed backstories of the paintings and falsely claiming to represent clients in Europe. Rosales pleaded guilty to nine criminal charges in September last year and faces up to 99 years in prison when she is sentenced later this year. She was also ordered to forfeit $33.2m in property and wealth and may face further penalties.

The brothers are charged with conspiring to commit wire fraud and money-laundering. Jose Carlos, who lived in New York, is also accused of defrauding the IRS and filing false tax returns to hide more than $7m in income from the scheme. If he is convicted of all the charges against him, he could be sentenced to as much as 114 years in prison. His brother faces a sentence of up to 80 years.

An official from the Spanish interior ministry told the New York Times last week that, after he was arrested at a hotel in Seville last Friday, Jose Carlos suffered an anxiety attack and was hospitalised. His brother had been arrested in Spain four days earlier, according to US prosecutors. Neither could be reached for comment on Tuesday. The US is expected to request their extradition by Spanish authorities under a treaty agreed to by the two countries in 1970.

Qian, however, is likely to prove more elusive. He and his wife are believed to have left for China several months before he was named as “the painter” at the centre of the scandal in August last year. At some point before that, US prosecutors confirm, he was questioned by the FBI. However, he claimed not to know Rosales or the names of artists whose work and signatures he is accused of forging, and insisted he had not faked their style.

“The downside for him will be that he can’t travel to the States any more, or to other countries with which the US does have an extradition treaty – most of Europe, many countries in South America and Hong Kong,” said Ku. “But China is a good place to run if you are fearing prosecution in the US.”