Need Some Help on the Gold-Plated Tungsten Bar News Story

[wwswimming]

there is a very interesting RUMOR that i need help substantiating. so far it's just a rumor here
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14996.html

Gld ETF Warning, Tungsten Filled Fake Gold Bars
Commodities / Gold & Silver 2009 Nov 12, 2009 - 12:22 PM

By: Rob_Kirby

“Gold Finger - A New Take On Operation Grand Slam With A Tungsten Twist”

I’ve already reported on irregular physical gold settlements which occurred in London, England back in the first week of October, 2009. Specifically, these settlements involved the intermediation of at least one Central Bank [The Bank of England] to resolve allocated settlements on behalf of J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank – who DID NOT have the gold bullion that they had sold short and were contracted to deliver. At the same time I reported on two other unusual occurrences:

Why Tungsten?

If anyone were contemplating creating “fake” gold bars, tungsten [at roughly $10 per pound] would be the metal of choice since it has the exact same density as gold making a fake bar salted with tungsten indistinguishable from a solid gold bar by simply weighing it.

Unfortunately, there are now more sordid details to report.

When the news of tungsten “salted” gold bars in Hong Kong first surfaced, many people

who I am acquainted with automatically assumed that these bars were manufactured in

China – because China is generally viewed as “the knock-off capital of the world”.

Here’s what I now understand really happened:

The amount of “salted tungsten” gold bars in question was allegedly between 5,600 and 5,700 – 400 oz – good delivery bars [roughly 60 metric tonnes].

This was apparently all highly orchestrated by an extremely well financed criminal operation.

Within mere hours of this scam being identified – Chinese officials had many of the perpetrators in custody.

And here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered:

Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day. I know folks who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox."


Rumor + not-even-cute Photoshop of Bernanke or Greenspan in front of Fort Knox.

OK, so the RUMOR is that some or most of the gold in Fort Knox and other US government vaults is fake. gold-plated tungsten, instead of gold.

i don't suppose any of AT'ers work at Fort Knox ?

no Bloomberg article, just currency & precious metal markets that are very, very nervous. of course, there's plenty of reasons to be concerned about the US $, considering the amount of debt the US government is taking on and the open and covert printing of US $ (Denninger @
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/

is REAL smart financially and was able to track the covert printing of money a few months ago. he looked at the Fed info and discovered that the Fed was selling bonds one week and buying them back the next, just by reading the bond sales reports & knowing what to look for. also, in March 2009, the US Gov. openly admitted printing $300 billion. that's what i mean by overt & cover printing of US $.


CLIFF's -
1. the currency markets have reason to be nervous about the US $, even without a rumor about gold-plated tungsten bars.
2. i want help determining if this rumor about gold-plated tungsten bars. is true or false.

a Google search is not helpful, at this point. you just get links to more commentary from other forums with precious metal investors.

ANYBODY KNOW ?

 

[fallout man]

Ohshi

 

[sandorski]

Damn, we need a Paper Shredder Overclocking Forum...NOW!!!!!!

 

[fallout man]

How is this going to play out for the folks that have been heavily investing in gold [tungsten] in the past couple of years. If this is true, things are going to really hit the fan.

 

[sandorski]

How is this going to play out for the folks that have been heavily investing in gold [tungsten] in the past couple of years. If this is true, things are going to really hit the fan.

hehe, indeed. Might actually cause a spike in the Gold Price, but damn the possibilities over this are scary. Within the last year there was Gold and other Precious Metals "missing" from Canada's Royal Mint(equivalentish to Ft Knox in the US). Makes you wonder. hmmm

 

[fallout man]

hehe, indeed. Might actually cause a spike in the Gold Price, but damn the possibilities over this are scary. Within the last year there was Gold and other Precious Metals "missing" from Canada's Royal Mint(equivalentish to Ft Knox in the US). Makes you wonder. hmmm

The personal issue I have with this kind of commodities trading is that the average investor never has the opportunity to "check out the goods."

It sucks to be the guy who bought 10kg of gold only to find out that the broker didn't know his shit, and sold him 9.9kg of tungsten. Ouch.

Thanks to the OP for the post and the info. This is big!

 

[mumedina]

If this is true, then count it as another nail in the coffin. More and more it is starting to look like the perfect recipe for something...what? I don't know- something catastrophic.

 

[Lemon law]

The specific gravity of tungsten is 19.25 and gold has a specific gravity of 19.30. Close but no cigar in terms of detecting fakes. Volume and weight tests are easy, but people are gullible.

Now that the alerts are out, I doubt the scam can be repeated as the frauds are purged out.

 

[kylebisme]

The specific gravity of tungsten is 19.25 and gold has a specific gravity of 19.30. Close but no cigar in terms of detecting fakes.

Perhaps they added a little something heavier in to even it out.

 

[Lemon law]

Perhaps they added a little something heavier in to even it out.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Admittedly without doing all the required research, the problem with the kylebisme contention is that few substances have a higher specific gravity than gold. And if they do,
they are even more expensive than gold. Rhenium springs to mind.

Even abundant depleted Uranium only has a specific gravity of 19.05, and as such is worse than tungsten.

A little google research yields the fact that Osmium is basically the densest metal, but at $100.00 a gram or so, its like 28 grams or so to get an ounce, kicking the price to $2800/ ounce which makes gold look cheap.

 

[silverpig]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Admittedly without doing all the required research, the problem with the kylebisme contention is that few substances have a higher specific gravity than gold. And if they do,
they are even more expensive than gold. Rhenium springs to mind.

Even abundant depleted Uranium only has a specific gravity of 19.05, and as such is worse than tungsten.

A little google research yields the fact that Osmium is basically the densest metal, but at $100.00 a gram or so, its like 28 grams or so to get an ounce, kicking the price to $2800/ ounce which makes gold look cheap.

Iridium. 22.05 and $380/oz

Quick math says 55 parts tungsten, 1 part iridium and you're set.

 

[Darwin333]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Admittedly without doing all the required research, the problem with the kylebisme contention is that few substances have a higher specific gravity than gold. And if they do,
they are even more expensive than gold. Rhenium springs to mind.

Even abundant depleted Uranium only has a specific gravity of 19.05, and as such is worse than tungsten.

A little google research yields the fact that Osmium is basically the densest metal, but at $100.00 a gram or so, its like 28 grams or so to get an ounce, kicking the price to $2800/ ounce which makes gold look cheap.

Betcha I could figure it out for a few trillion bucks.

Anything is possible as long as you have time and money and the more you have of one the less you need of the other.

 

[Lemon law]

Damn that silverpig, I groc his math.

Time to go into the gold fraud business.

 

[Cogman]

The specific gravity of tungsten is 19.25 and gold has a specific gravity of 19.30. Close but no cigar in terms of detecting fakes. Volume and weight tests are easy, but people are gullible.

Now that the alerts are out, I doubt the scam can be repeated as the frauds are purged out.

You don't have to find another metal, just use pure gold + a little tungsten. You could by 5 lbs of gold, and mix it with 0.5 lbs of tungsten and make a hefty profit that is hard to detect. Want more safety? how about 0.25 lbs of tungsten. It doesn't take a lot to start turning a profit.

 

[soccerballtux]

I bet dmcowen would be all over this. Somebody notify him (I don't mean this as a callout just in a friendly jocular manner. Is that ok?)
In all seriousness, doesn't bother me. They'll figure it out.

 

[StageLeft]

Bullsh*t of course, this was started I think by a guy who has ads like BUY GOLD all over his website. I first heard about this from karl denninger, so that alone told me it may be BS and no real websites were carrying it, it's days old now. It's obviously total rubbish, ignore it.

 

[wwswimming]

How is this going to play out for the folks that have been heavily investing in gold [tungsten] in the past couple of years. If this is true, things are going to really hit the fan.

this applies to 400 ounce bricks that usually just sit in vaults, like in the movie Die Hard 3.

the smaller 1 ounce coins & kilo bricks are safer. the kilo bricks are often used by jewelry supply companies so they get melted down all the time - so there's many more opportunities to discover fakes.

what makes the 400 ounce bars a tempting target for counterfeiting is that they usually just sit in vaults. that plus the fact that, well, it's $440,000+ worth of gold at today's prices, which are fluctuating wildly.

 

[Lemon law]

I also happened to think, we are limiting our thinking to only specific gravity, but if we
start thinking out of the box, metals are different in quite a number of ways.

Fox example gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, tungsten badly lags. We could also talk about sound wave propagation, and other characteristics.

At least in a vault storage situation, it should not be difficult or expensive to develop
an easy and non destructive way to test, thereby forcing the now discovered fraud back on only the small scale consumer market.

 

[Cogman]

I also happened to think, we are limiting our thinking to only specific gravity, but if we
start thinking out of the box, metals are different in quite a number of ways.

Fox example gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, tungsten badly lags. We could also talk about sound wave propagation, and other characteristics.

At least in a vault storage situation, it should not be difficult or expensive to develop
an easy and non destructive way to test, thereby forcing the now discovered fraud back on only the small scale consumer market.

Making gold bars with small tungston cores would defeat almost every testing method you just listed. electricity travels on the surface of metals (the outside is pure gold).

Thermal conductivity might catch it, but with a small core it would be pretty hard to see.

 

[bfdd]

Making gold bars with small tungston cores would defeat almost every testing method you just listed. electricity travels on the surface of metals (the outside is pure gold).

Thermal conductivity might catch it, but with a small core it would be pretty hard to see.

exactly take .2 of an ounce out of every bar replace it with tungston and in the long run you'll have a crap load of extra gold that is profitable.

 

[wwswimming]

The specific gravity of tungsten is 19.25 and gold has a specific gravity of 19.30. Close but no cigar in terms of detecting fakes. Volume and weight tests are easy, but people are gullible.

Now that the alerts are out, I doubt the scam can be repeated as the frauds are purged out.

you could put in a slug of something heavier, depleted uranium might be one example. if there's one thing gold dealers have in abundance, it's accurate scales. these bars took some engineering to get them ready for counterfeiting prime-time.

i went for a walk this morning and stopped at a local coin dealer to talk about some Xmas gifts i wanted to get for my nieces.

i asked him about the gold-plated tungsten bar story.

he said he went to a conference about 2 weeks ago and that was one of the topics of conversation. he said the story is real, they were warned about counterfeit 400 ounce bars. now everybody in the world who has a 400 ounce bar is scratching their heads.

this is a business opportunity. how many countries have central banks with 400 ounce bars ? it's a perfect customer - nice and wealthy, and nervous as hell.

i hope our governments have the courage to investigate, to indict, and to seize assets. though they haven't shown any courage along those lines with the financial fraud that was uncovered in the 2007-2009 time-frame. the entire credit derivatives was riddled with fraud, e.g. the ratings agencies were knowingly giving good ratings to products they knew were garbage.

CLIFFs

* coin dealer admits they were warned about counterfeit 400 ounce bars at a conference 2 weeks ago.
* bought some fortune cookies at Safeway.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Well lets just pretend that the semarian tablets are true accouting of our history. Than let us also pretend that enoch book is a true diverant version of same story.

Man was created in our image and he was made to be slave to dig gold for the gods so called. They left but promised to return in the future. Its that they left Watchers behind . S0 for about 3500 years They been gone. But its time for them to return . If this is a true history . The chances of there being any GOLD in KNOX is absolutly zero.

We were created to scurr the earth for the GOLD!! Than they return to collect it. But whats really alarming is what is discovered after great upheaval on earth. Read enoch to find out. But Gold disappearing at this moment in time is what should be expected if the old writtings and tablets are trueth of our history. But it does all make sense if you view our history as not truely being in our own hands. If ya want to find the Gold check Rothschilds vaults you will find it their.

 

[shira]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Admittedly without doing all the required research, the problem with the kylebisme contention is that few substances have a higher specific gravity than gold. And if they do,
they are even more expensive than gold. Rhenium springs to mind.

Even abundant depleted Uranium only has a specific gravity of 19.05, and as such is worse than tungsten.

A little google research yields the fact that Osmium is basically the densest metal, but at $100.00 a gram or so, its like 28 grams or so to get an ounce, kicking the price to $2800/ ounce which makes gold look cheap.

True. But you only need sufficient osmium to make up the difference in density. For example:

x*19.25 + (1 - x)*22.61 = 19.30 ==> x = .98512.

So, by volume, 98.512% tungsten + 1.488% osmium yields the density of gold. Or to put it another way, to make 1 ounce of gold (worth about $1000), you need only about .422 grams of osmium (worth less than $42).

 

[Ken g6]

I wonder if maybe some of the gold at Fort Knox is gold-plated Tungsten, but no one would actually try to pass it off as gold. Maybe it's just a last line of defense against theft. Sure, gold dealers have accurate scales, but I imagine it's not so easy to bring one on a gold heist. So maybe the gold-plated Tungsten is intentionally a little off-weight so it can be detected?

Or maybe I'm just naive.

 

[Fern]

I don't think scales would be of help. I bet each bar with a tungsten core weighs the appropriate amount, just a wee bit larger dimensions.

Fern