Shortages of physical Gold & Silver everywhere – Gold and silver bullion coin and bar shortages continue. Now is the time to be very careful what you are buying. 

Avoiding fake silver and counterfeit gold products

If you have followed gold and silver market news over the past few years, it is likely you have seen various reports on fake gold and silver products.

In March 2012, a 1 kilo tungsten gold bar turned up in the United Kingdom.

Then in September 2012 there were reports on a slew of 10 oz tungsten gold bars bought and sold in New York’s jewelry district.

The big problem with these news reports is that they have given little to no solution on how the public at large can avoid fake bullion products.  

We would like to raise the general awareness of this issue both with our customers, our industry, and the general gold and silver investing public at large.  With more than a year of hands on research, we have identified some of the biggest fake silver and gold counterfeit threats facing the investing public today.

This Special Report on the growing threat of fake silver and counterfeit gold products will arm you with solutions on how to best avoid being ripped off by sellers of phony bullion products.

For many years in the silver bullion industry, rebuttals downplaying counterfeit product concerns would go something like this:

It is less likely that counterfeiters will make fake silver coins if they could make fake gold products or larger fake silver bars.  It would also be very difficult to make high quality fake silver coins with exact weighting.  Also the US gov’t has very strict laws against counterfeiting making the production of private mint product fakes far more attractive for counterfeiters ( the punishment being less severe for producing private mint fake products vs gov’t mint fake products ).  Finally, there’s just not enough profit in it for crooks to make counterfeit silver coins.

None of these arguments hold water now.

The fact is high quality fake silver coins and small fake silver bars are being produced in high volumes in China.  In particular there are fake silver eagle coins being struck and distributed priced as low as 50¢ a piece ( with capacity of wholesale production lots of 100,000+ pieces ).   

“As long as China allows these manufacturers to produce these ( fake ) legal tender coins, it is an act of war when one country counterfeits another country’s legal tender currency.  So this is very, very serious.”  states Mike Maloney, author of the “Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver.”

High quality fake silver coins and bars are a serious threat to your local coin shops, online bullion dealers everywhere, and to all physical bullion investors. 

Many high quality silver fakes have exact weighting and dimensions, and to the untrained eye (or to the dealer without counterfeit proofing technologies) fake bullion products can easily be passed off (mistakenly or knowingly) as bonafide bullion products.

How bad is the counterfeiting problem?

You name the bullion product, we can most likely find a Chinese wholesaler making fake versions of them.  

• The US Mint
• The Canadian Mint
• The Perth Mint
• The Mexican Mint
• The Austrian Mint
• The Chinese Mint
• The South African Mint
• Many Private Mint products  
• Collectable Numismatic Coins ( Fake silver morgans, walking liberties, old fake coins from Great Britain, old fake Spanish & Austrian, etc. )

Governments Cannot Protect Bullion Investors – Example: HR 5977 Hobby Protection Act 

In 2012, the Industry Council for Tangible Assets (ICTA) unsuccessfully lobbied to have HR 5977 passed in the U.S. Congress.  The proposed bill has since died (referred to committee).

How are these fake bullion products being produced?

There are basically two methods being utilized in fake gold and silver coin and bar production:

• There are plated gold and silver coins and bars, consisting of a thin layer of gold or silver covering base metal alloys underneath.  
• Then there are hallowed out gold and silver bars and coins with thicker covers of gold and or silver, filled with tungsten, lead, copper, and or nickel.

How to avoid fake bullion products!

• Know your bullion dealer.  
• Make certain they have counterfeit proofing measurements in place to assure they never accidentally introduce fake bullion products into their inventories.  
• Make certain your bullion dealer guarantees the authenticity of every product they sell.

The vast majority of bullion products we sell are new, freshly struck products which move through a chain of integrity.  Meaning the bullion is moving from mints and refiners, to us, then to our customers.  

Any secondary bullion products we sell are assayed and verified authentic utilizing multiple noninvasive, proprietary counterfeit-proofing methods to verify the authenticity of evert product we buy and sell.