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Gold scam.


Will B Good

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19 hours ago, realfunster said:

As Lopburi3 mentions, many moons ago I took a 18k gold item to a Thai gold shop, they were not interested in the slightest.

I see some gold ships selling 18K jewelery.   The ones I have seen it in called it 'Italian gold'

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18 hours ago, Lacessit said:

There is another gold scam to be wary of.

Tungsten and gold have almost identical densities.

Gold-plate a tungsten bar, and it is suddenly far more valuable.

AFAIK small gold shops usually determine purity by density.

The scam can be detected quite quickly with a Rockwell hardness meter. However, they are expensive machines.

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-tungsten-gold-2012-9

 

Use a steel nail or file, won't touch tungsten. (Mohs harness)

 

gold 24K    2.5

gold 14K    3.5-3.8

iron nail   ~4-4

steel nail   5-7

steel file    ~7.5

tungsten    8-9

 

Though I doubt anyone would make ordinary jewelry from tungsten. It melts at 3422 °C (6,191.6 °F) and is so hard it will dent a steel hammer used to shape it.

 

 

Edited by rabas
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1 hour ago, rabas said:

Use a steel nail or file, won't touch tungsten. (Mohs harness)

 

gold 24K    2.5

gold 14K    3.5-3.8

iron nail   ~4-4

steel nail   5-7

steel file    ~7.5

tungsten    8-9

 

Though I doubt anyone would make ordinary jewelry from tungsten. It melts at 3422 °C (6,191.6 °F) and is so hard it will dent a steel hammer used to shape it.

 

 

I wasn't suggesting jewellery, only bullion.

I suppose some smarty could come up with a layer of gold thickness that would defeat Mohs or Rockwell testing. Tungsten only costs $3.25 per pound, gold is more than USD 2000 an ounce.

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9 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

I wasn't suggesting jewellery, only bullion.

I suppose some smarty could come up with a layer of gold thickness that would defeat Mohs or Rockwell testing. Tungsten only costs $3.25 per pound, gold is more than USD 2000 an ounce.

 

Agree, that's why I said ordinary jewelry. I too would test a gold bar. 

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I've taken some of my wife's jewellery back to the shops where we bought it from....generally to exchange lower weight necklaces for bigger weight ones. It is a con, they change a per carat fee for accepting your jewellery, they give an inferior rate for your jewellery vs the adverted per carat weight, then they charge a fee per carat for purchasing the new item. A couple of years back we wanted to exchange a 3 carat necklace for 5 carat....gold was about 20,000 at the time...the additional fees totalled 20,000 or thereabout meaning they were charging 1 carat worth for the simple transaction. I told them to GTH.

I think most gold jewellery sold in 9 carat everywhere in the world. High carat weights are unsuitable for jewellery.

A whole back I started buying these 1 baht gold 'bars' which are supposed to be 99% gold. I'll take one back to the jeweller to see what they offer. If they tell me the gold is 9 carat and inferior I'll go the police. 

Edited by retarius
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