Fake gold bars popping up in New York City
Back in March, a little-read report came out of the U.K. detailing a particularly clever caper.
After the buyer of a gold bar became suspicious, he drilled into it, only to find what he thought was 1 kg of pure gold was anything but. Much of the gold had been hollowed from the centre and replaced with tungsten, a much less precious metal that shares a similar weight to gold.
At the time, and for months after, it was a real Whodunit, if an isolated one.
But things just got a whole lot more interesting. Bogus gold bars with the same tungsten core have popped up in New York City now, too.
According to Fox New York, a buyer recently scooped up a 10-ounce bar from a reputable gold dealer for $18,000.
*Bing: Why it pays to own gold
But something didn’t seem right, so the buyer, as did the one in England, drilled into the bar to find it was filled with tungsten, which costs just over a dollar an ounce (gold, by contrast, sold for more than $1,700 per ounce Thursday).
Now, sceptics are saying there’s a fake gold bar ring going around, and at least the sophistication is there.
In order to pull off the ruse, scammers must drill into the bars, melt out the real gold and fill it with tungsten. The bar is then closed up, but since its serial number remains intact, it’s near impossible to tell just what’s inside that pricey hunk of gold.
Remarkably, such suspicions may not be new.
One-time U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul famously demanded an audit of the American gold reserves last year, alleging the gold in Fort Knox and elsewhere might be fraudulent, too.
By Jason Buckland, MSN Money
Posted by: Jim | Sep 20, 2021 3:54:06 PM
And here I was ready to add my witty comment about Fort Knox and you go and steal my thunder in the last paragraph!
That said, The American's might have L1ed about WMD in Iraq or getting attacked in other wars .... But this would be totally different! They would never lie about their reserves.
Would they?
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