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Image from ABC Bullion
A 1,000 gram gold bar with a tungsten core was bought by a scrap dealer’s staff in the United Kingdom, reports ABC Bullion.
Visually, the bar appeared sound; however, the dealer noted that the bar was underweight by two grams. A test with a hand-held XRF found the bar at 99.998% AU, and the bar had original certificate.
Pictures of the bars reveal that some ingenuity would have been required to insert the tungsten since the gold bar is so thin. Tungsten bars can be found on eBay.
According to conspiracy-minded, this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg. SilverDoctors wonders how many gold bars held by governments are actually salted.
Felix Salmon, financial blogger at Reuters, weighs the larger question of whether this discovery is a mark against the very thing that supposedly make gold superior to fiat currency.
“Any store of value has problems, be it fiat currency or sovereign debt or bitcoins,” writes Salmon.
“This latest discovery just goes to show that the problems with gold aren’t just the obvious ones surrounding things like the risk that the price of gold might plunge. There are non-obvious ones, too, which have the potential to be even bigger.”
7 Comments
StoppEU
The German company GEM Security Tools http://www.gemsecurity.de offers a test set for gold, silver and platinum that detects tungsten fakes as well as all other fakes in gold, silver and platinum.
Golddigger
Somewhere in my addled brain I recall a story about a Greek in a bathtub, and how the word Eureka became indelibly linked to the yellow metal.
Seems that if governments have been duped by similar practices, they never learned how to use a set of callipers. The density of the 2 metals is great enough that a tape measure would likely solve the problem.
Johan
Gold bar at a scrap dealer? Should the sale of all Gold not be regulated in some way or form?
Guest1654
That’s all we need, more regulation!
And in gold sales at that where people try to get away from the encroaching state.
Justajo
Agreed. It is the regulation of gold in order to make us dependent on worthless paper that got us to where we are today. What we need is a return to the age-old axiom: Let the buyer beware. This actually requires some work – and smarts – on the part of the buyer, but it’s the only way that has reliably worked over the centuries.
tungstunj
good blog ,learn from it
PeterE
No surprises here. Watch this become even more common.