FAKE GOLD............

Log on to: www.commodityonline.com

The article in under commodity news......."Fake Gold is more authentic than ever".

It would be interesting to know how much it costs to make this alloy as the rare-earth metals used are quite expensive themselves before you even consider the fact that they are also using 51% actual gold. I'd assume its only economically viable for the fraudsters to manufacture this when the spot price of gold exceeds a certain amount and the rare-earths are below a certain amount. A possible test for this fake gold alloy could be to scribe a gold sample on some extremely fine abrasive paper. If the stripe completely dissolves when exposed to aqua regia then it's likely to be gold. If the aqua regia doesn't fully dissolve the stripe the next step would be to add bleach to dissolve the remainder, as bleach is about the only thing known to man that can dissolve Ruthenium.

I heard that Tungsten was being used and heavily gold plated or dipped in real gold a few times.
Tungsten has almost the same weight and denisty of gold at about $20 a pound.

I dont know if this has been brought up before by anyone else. So I thought i would mention it.

explorer wrote:I heard that Tungsten was being used and heavily gold plated or dipped in real gold a few times.
Tungsten has almost the same weight and denisty of gold at about $20 a pound.

I dont know if this has been brought up before by anyone else. So I thought i would mention it.

Sound-waves travel slower through Tungsten than through gold, which is one of the easiest ways to analyze a suspicious ingot. But the Chinese claimed to have heated their purchased Fort Knox Gold 400oz bars and supposedly the heat is shed slower or faster through Tungsten... which is how they claimed to have discovered the fraud.

With the exception of a video from Germany showing a smaller (1kg?) gold bar that was supposedly with a tungsten core... there's apparently no evidence at all that the Chinese received fake bullion bars. If anything, the conspiracy theorists are claiming now that this statement was deliberately linked by the governments wanting to decrease public interest in Gold investments for their portfolios... and to increase faith in Fiat based currencies.

nero-design

I heard on the grapevine that 16000 400oz tungsten bars coated with gold were produced in the 1990's by a big ingot manufacturer in the USA. This was a special order for a undisclosed client and was picked up by the military and dispatched somewhere. Talk is to Fort Knocks (sic). About the time Clinton balanced the US federal budgets and they were in a positive for a change..

400oz gold bars are the ones stored by governments and big banks from recollection.

( MAYBE JUST ANOTHER URBAN MYTH )

Someone also said that Tungsten covered in gold or gold plate begins to get slightly brittle over long periods of time. Unlike real gold bar which are inert.

Supposedly a couple of these tungsten gold plated bars have made their way to german refiners and china as u mentioned. Could easily be done by crooks in their own country.

It's not a myth, there are videos on the web of a german testing lab that has detected these and they actually dissect them to reveal the tungsten core. The method of detection they are using is ultrasound. The tungsten gold fiasco first came to light a few years back when the Chinese discovered it in their holdings. Inside sources in the US say 1,000,000 tungsten blanks were made, though nobody is sure how many were gold coated and distributed.

So the Chinese are having a dummy spit because they got conned into buying a heap of fake stuff?? bit of irony there

madtuna wrote: bit of irony there

No, i believe it was Tungsten

But yeah! paybacks a b!tch! and the irony of it is... we will have to pay for it with more crap products that are microchiped into dying on the very day the warranty lapses.

Or like the mans bracelet I bought (stamped 925)......I carried out a specific gravity test which was 8.0=CRAP!