Ten more bars of fake gold have shown up. The story is here. They are limited to PAMP bars, which are issued in France.
Federal agents are investigating the peddling of bogus gold bars in Midtown.
The Post has learned as many as 10 fake gold bars — made up mostly of relatively worthless tungsten — were sold recently to unsuspecting dealers in Manhattan’s Midtown Diamond District.
The price of gold has risen more than 600 percent since January 2000, while the S&P 500 index is down 0.6 percent over the same period.
The report goes on to say: “The 10-oz. gold bars are hugely popular with Main Street investors, and it is not known how many of the fake gold bars were sold to dealers — or if any fake bars were purchased by the public.” On the contrary, gold coins are popular with Main Street investors. Gold ETFs are popular on Wall Street.
Buy gold coins from a dealer who has been around for a decade. The coins are safe.
I buy gold coins from a local shop. I buy them dented, scratched, smudged… OLD, in other words. I pass up the sparkling, shiney metal and go right to the end of the glass case to the coins in the old wooden box.
Lately I haven't has enough to buy gold, so silver has had to do. Silver is much easier, since it tarnishes, and there's relatively little incentive to counterfeit a silver coin.
Gosh, for a minute there I thought they were going to say the fake gold bars were discovered at Fort Knox..has anyone seen if we still have any gold there?? with obama in Washington I would not be surprised to find it empty.
Yeah, I mostly have silver now as I had to sell all my gold. I think it will make bigger gains anyway though.
Has anyone seen this website about silver investment?
http://silver-investment.net/
[...] bars — made up mostly of relatively worthless tungsten — were sold recently to unsuspecting dealers in Manhattan’s Midtown Diamond District.The price of gold has risen more than 600 percent since [...]
If I were a gold broker I would invest in a good used hospital ultrasound device for around $1000. Passing it over a coin or bar will reveal if it's just gold plate fused to a baser metal.
So much for the expertise of the brokers.
Handheld ultrasonic thickness measuring device are $200 (or less) delivered off ebay.
They measure the thickness via the speed of sound in that particular material.
So if you set them for gold, they will return a value of about half the actual thickness if the 'gold' bar is mostly tungsten (speed of sound roughly 2x in tungsten vs gold).
I'd buy one to test gold & silver coins were I a regular buyer (there are a LOT of Chinese silver dollar fakes out there)
Texas is right, not much incentive to fake a silver coin. I look for melt value silver coins, more 'bulky' but safe and easer to barter with.
(sp.) easier
Also, this scam would only work if the gold bars were sold to investors who were just going to hang onto them and who would be convinced they were genuine, having just paid market price for them.
It doesn’t make sense that the bars are being sold to jewelers who intend to melt them down to make bling, since that's exactly where the first bar surfaced last week.
Whoever is behind this scam, the LAST thing they would want is for the fake bars to be immediately uncovered….unless they meant for news of the discovery to scare investors away from buying gold.
All it takes is a cheap, accurate scale, a ruler and a calculator. If the density of the bar is not exactly right, it is not gold.
No, the density of tungsten is so close to that of gold only the device I previously mentioned would be able to discover such a counterfeit.
"Because the density is so similar to gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten