Art recovery experts marveled at the audacity of the Paris burglary and debated whether a criminal gang was trying to send a message to other organized crime groups with the theft of five paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani. The burglary, they said, probably is part of a trend among criminals to steal paintings for use as underworld collateral in the face of bank crackdowns on money laundering.

“It is very difficult now to move money through the banking system without being traceable by the police,” said Julian Radcliffe, president of Art Loss Recovery, a private database of lost and stolen art based in London. “If you are a criminal and you want to move money from England to Switzerland or Paris to Italy, you have to have a way of moving value without being discovered. You can’t use the banking system and you can’t use cash.”

In cases that Art Loss has tracked, Mr. Radcliffe said that stolen paintings have been used, for example, as collateral by Colombian drug dealers and cigarette smugglers in the Balkans.

Typically, a painting is used as currency on the black market at 10 percent of its real value, according to Antonia Kimbell, recoveries manager for Art Loss Register, who said artworks are usually stolen and passed through a hierarchy of thieves — burglars outsourced from another country to elude investigators and brokers to move the paintings.

For those who do try to offer stolen art on the open market, the effort is fraught with risks. Art Recovery worked on a case with the F.B.I. involving Robert Mardirosian, 74, a one-time Massachusetts state prosecutor, whose conviction for possessing stolen property was upheld last month. His story dates back to 1978, when his client, David Colvin, was accused of stealing seven paintings, including a Cezanne, from a home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.