Tungsten gold plated bar | Hacker News Reader

Tungsten gold plated bar

tungsten-alloy.com

Tungsten and gold have a comparable density. This company sells realistic looking, fake gold bars, that are supposed to pass typical tests as well. They are advertising them for e.g. as a prop for trade fares and such. Whoever would need a prop at a trade fare to pass a chemical test is anyone's guess...

Yes, fake gold bars like this have obviously already been used for fraud, e.g. of the top of my head: in 2016 a then-18-year-old in Göttingen sold 259 fake bars to a local bank for a total of ~300k Euro until somebody realized it. [1](German)

[1] https://www.haz.de/der-norden/wieso-hat-niemand-das-falschgo...

I didn’t realize there were banks that would buy gold bars from a random 18 year old.

In multiple transactions, and they called him and asked whether he had more of it. (“Das Geldinstitut soll ihn sogar zwischendurch angerufen und gefragt haben, ob er nicht noch mehr habe.”)

That makes it look like and inside job to me. Alternatively, they must have paid significantly below market value.

You can't fool an honest man.

Yes you can. Sell him something fake at a real item's fair price.

Yes but if it's a fair price there's every chance he'll buy from some other guy selling the real deal.

Now if you definitely (and you're taking a risk with the shenanigans you need to go through to get/setup this fake item so you want to get paid) want to sell it you need to undercut the fair price. How can you explain a low price? Well, the easy way is to convince the mark that either the two of you are in on a scam together or that the mark is the con.

Personally I don't really agree with that statement, "You can't fool an honest man." but I can see the logic that drives it. Generally it seems like the honest people who get scammed are the ones who are trying to help someone which makes the people running these scams see even more pathetic.

finding that amount of gold bars is incredibly hard. People usually respond "comex & london" has gold bars? I dare say 30% are fake, numerous occasions where gold bars stored in the vault are fake.

In light of this week’s banking collapse precipitated by (among other things) lost confidence, I’ll ask:

To what extent does it matter that some of the bars in the vault are fake if everyone has confidence they’re real?

Also it seems like anyone who might inadvertently acquired some in lieu of the real thing & suspect the fraud down the line, they really have little incentive to cut the bar in half to find out. Best not to know.

It doesn't matter, as long as no one notices. You could say the same about counterfeit anything.

It doesn't matter as long as you're not the one holding the bag when it gets discovered and something negative happens

At some point someone will need to melt it down to use for industry, or for another purpose, or form. Say a comex bar, or smaller bars, or for alloying, whatever.

Anyone who thinks they might be that person, or thinks they might sell to that person, certainly cares! They’re the ones who will suffer the consequences of the fraud.

One example of a use that requires real gold is the manufacture of gold plated tungsten.

If he made 300k, those were probably 100g bars or smaller, not giant movie vault gold bars.

> giant movie vault gold bars.

Also called "Good Delivery Bars", typically 400oz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Delivery

Fort Knox is audited regularly, and in 1974 cogress sent a delegation to verify it. One can easily imagine nefarious actors siphoning some off; how many tungsten bars are in there? They’d have to test every bar to know for sure. Has this been done?

https://www.usmint.gov/learn/history/historical-documents/in...

There are some great historical nuggets in that archive, I liked this appeal to people to stop hoarding pennies and get them back into circulation.

> Creating a shortage where it does not exist can adversely affect every public spirited citizen, taxpayer and conservator of the earth’s resources. It is inflationary should merchants start to round off sales to the next nickel due to lack of pennies to make change.

> Again, I’d like to emphasize. There are plenty of pennies. But they are in the wrong places.

> It is estimated that over 30 billion pennies are in circulation—doing the job for which they were intended. Somewhere in this vast country of ours, however, in excess of 30 billion pennies are in hiding. These are the pennies I’m looking for. They are in dresser drawers, shoe boxes, pickle jars; most anyplace you can think of that will get them out of pocket and out of sight. They are unwanted, unused and unappreciated.

https://www.usmint.gov/learn/history/historical-documents/mi...

I have to laugh though - it would be trivial for someone in the executive hierarchy there to walk off with them and cover it up. The whole thing is intentionally opaque.

And even better - that gold was mostly gold seized by the gov’t from private citizens when private ownership of gold was banned and all circulating coinage and other gold was seized!

It truly is an attractive nuisance for the corrupt.

No, it is not audited regularly.

I can't speak for gold, but in 1942 the Treasury lent 14,700 tons of silver to the Manhattan project; they only lost about 3-4 kg of it.

Gold

From the article it sounds like the Göttingen guy bought is gold bars from this very site!

Bars are unpopular among gold bullion.. hoarders for this exact reason. People generally only buy factory sealed and assayed bars but most prefer government minted coins. They are very intricate and quite thin so not really possible to fake. Plus they are usually technically legal currency so counterfeiting them is very serious.

US gold eagle, Canadian Maple, Australian Kangaroo, Austrian Philharmonic. I’d recommend anyone with a little interest in physical assets to grab one as they’re beautiful pieces and tend to hold their value over centuries

Accurate!

There are starting to be tungsten cored fake coins good enough to fool most, so validation is still required.

[https://m.alibaba.com/product/60579932545/Gold-Plated-Tungst...]

Fascinating! I’ve never seen the point of owning gold and have wondered why people would buy gold coins (or why they sell simply for the price of the underlying content) rather than just buying plain old bars of whatever size.

I still don’t understand why people buy gold but at least I now see why it’s sensible to buy coins.

My mum married draped in gold jewelry which was too soft to be worn again. I’ve seen the photos and saw the gold as a kid in their safe deposit box, where it’s sat for 60 years. Given that she moved to the west, what was the point?

Gold is often (though not all the time) anti-cyclical: as stock market goes down, gold goes up. It can be used as a hedge.

The reason to own gold is that there is no counter party risk. It can also help transfer wealth between incompatible systems. If there is a currency reset, lost war, or you end up a refugee - Gold is a great option.

That’s assuming gold keeps its value in that sort of event! Not that I think that’s unlikely, since we have a long history of lusting after gold and generally appreciating shiny things… but given the metal itself has relatively little utility, it’s like an other currency in that it ultimately relies on people perceiving it as valuable for it to actually be, well, valuable!

I can’t really think of anything that would have a better chance in a WW3 scenario for example. Any currency could get devalued to heck due to war killing their economy, crypto needs a global trustworthy internet and a China/U.S. could launch a cyber attack on the local chain, etc.

Maybe potato seedlings or canned meat will be more reliable

Yeah definitely… outside of like, things that do stuff (seeds, medicine, etc.) gold probably has the best chance of still being worth something in almost any scenario! And it’s very dense value-wise and easy to store, which can’t be said for the others!

> relatively little utility

I wouldn’t call being used in virtually all microchips “little utility,” even relatively.

It’s hard to imagine a situation where the currencies of the world devalue to zero, but the semiconductor fabs keep working.

Sure, but there are plenty of plausible futures where the currency of one country, even a major country like China or the USA, has their currency completely devalued, and semiconductor fabs keep working.

Oooh yeah definitely, no argument from me there. I’m more stating that it doesn’t have much utility in a huge catastrophe where we can’t make microchips.

Many people have many reasons. Lots of prepper types. Personally I just think it’s cool and fun. Much more satisfying than just seeing a number go up on a website. It’s very cumbersome and dangerous to have a lot of gold though. There isn’t a great solution to storing it. Even a safety deposit box at a bank isn’t insured to more than I believe $200 of precious metals. So if the bank burns or floods or the feds seize it or it goes bankrupt then you probably won’t see that box again. I wouldn’t buy more because of that and also since it’s physical there are a lot of fees - shipping, insuring, storing, mining-refining-minting cost, fees from sellers, low ball offers when you sell yourself, etc. Big headache for larger amounts. But having a few thousand dollars in that form is neat. And it’s a bit of a hedge against any bad event - you can put a few in your pocket and land in any major city in the world and cash it in immediately.

Plus there are not really any other things that have held significant value for thousands of years. Other than perishables - so great for time traveling too

The Perth Mint in Australia got caught diluting the gold [0] that they sold to China.

[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-06/perth-mint-gold-dopin...

you make it sound like they were trying to rip the chinese gov off. the difference was 99.99 to 99.999 and it was a small number out of a large shipment and it was clearly and accident. Its also taking the chinese gov on good faith as they wont ship it back for testing (china buys a lot of gold, and hoards it, its against the law to ship gold out of the country).

as the WA Premier said.. its a f*** storm in a teacup

As stated in the article, the Perth Mint's original deal with Shanghai Gold had included Shanghai Gold testing the gold to make sure it met the 99.999% standard of Shanghai Gold as part of signing the contract. After that point, Perth Mint intentionally chose to dope the gold they were delivering down to 99.99% in order to save ~$670,000. This wasn't them switching to a cheaper process or less pure source material - they had an actual employee go into their gold supplies and dope them with lesser metals in order to save money. As soon as Shanghai Gold complained and they realised it had been detected, said employee stopped doping the gold that same day - this wasn't a dispute over standards, them stopping as soon as they were discovered shows they knew they were in the wrong. This was, very clearly, not an accident. It was also not a "small number", it was $8.7 billion dollars worth of gold that will need to be recalled. We also don't need to take the "chinese gov" on good faith, Perth Mint tested it themselves and found non-compliance. They then attempted a cover-up, reporting separate findings of compliance to Shanghai Gold and intentionally withholding their own testing that had found non-compliance.

This isn't a storm in a teacup, it's high level corruption in nearly $9Bn worth of trade. The fact that China is the victim really shouldn't factor into it, should it? It's also a bit rich of the WA Premier, as good as he can be on some other issues, to say that this particular issue is a storm in a teacup when he used to run the Perth Mint and may be personally implicated in any finding of corruption.

In some jurisdiction these are illegal.

Switzerland has "Precious Metal Control", so I think I can't import fake gold bars without the risk they being confiscated. Not that I would want. I imported a tungsten cube, not as large as these in the Tiktok videos, but it is really a weird feeling to keep it in the hand. Tungsten is brittle and might break if you drop it and probably also the surface dropped on is in danger of getting a hole, so I feel a strange responsibility by just holding the cube.

https://www.bazg.admin.ch/bazg/en/home/topics/precious-metal...

Also the law:

https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/50/345_357_401/en

I bought a cube of tungsten and a cube of magnesium to teach my kids about density, and I was really surprised how dangerous it feels just to hold the tungsten. I only let them hold it a few inches above a table because that thing would break your foot if you dropped it! If you hold the magnesium and drop it one inch you get a delicate little “clop” and if you drop the tungsten one inch you get a solid “BANG”.

I got one of those sets too and was wondering how the heck they manage to cast a tungsten cube given how high the melting point is. But it turns out the actual process uses sintering. (At least for this super inexpensive set we bought)

Is tungsten really brittle, or are you actually referring to tungsten carbide? I often see people mixing those up.

Tungsten isn't brittle - but those cubes are sintered, not cast, and sintered metal is brittle.

Oo this is relevant to my world (professional coin & currency dealer here)!

A scourge, but relevant. To address a few different things people have said in sibling comments:

* Theft/security at coin shows is actually a real issue. I know the instinct may be to laugh when they say "Tungsten gold plated bar is the best choice if you are a gold dealer and attend some trade fair or put your gold products in the showcase..." but that almost kinnnnnnnda makes sense. But only kinda. The security issue these days isn't so much about the physical bars being stolen as it is being followed AFTER the show and someone just does an old fashioned smash-and-grab through a window of your car. The advice lately is DO NOT STOP after leaving a show, make sure you're not being followed, etc. Insane but reality.

* Counterfeiting is, unfortunately, also a real issue, and companies like this don't help. The gold standard (ha ha ha) for detection right now is an XRF gun, but the problem is twofold: One, those guns cost $15,000-$20,000, and two, people trust them, so when a good fake can pass an XRF test, the chances are it's going to defraud someone.

* Someone else asked about why people want gold/silver bars/coins. The die-hards (who are remarkably similar to crypto die-hards) will say some familiar stuff -- fiat is worthless, when it all goes to hell you'll still have "real money", they don't trust banks, etc. The more common thinking is just asset diversification/investment. You may not understand a T-Bill or Muni Bond or GOOG cashflow statement, but it's pretty easy to make a bet on gold/silver and buy a few actual pieces of gold silver.

The coins come in several flavors -- there's the modern stuff (American Eagles/Buffalos, Canadian Maple Leafs, South African Kruggerands, etc.) which is valued because, ironically, it's backed and produced by a government so considered to be more real/trustworthy. There's also what's known as "constitutional" silver (actual US coins from pre-1964, which are made of 90% silver) and "pre-33" gold, which are actual US coins from pre-1933, which are made of 90% gold. For similar reasons, they are valued because they WERE money, with known purity etc.

Fun stuff -- feel free to ping me if anyone wants more info!

That is super interesting. I assume it’s easy to spoof the density? And this is probably a stupid question, but do people ever try to alloy the gold to mix in an impurity in a subtle way?

The product description goes into detail of how to produce a fake gold bar and how real their product appears, and even emphasizes that it passes common tests for authenticity - chemical, weight, resonance and even x-ray. "Our gold-plated tungsten bar and tungsten alloy golden bar are only for souvenir and decoration purpose". But, of course...

Ultrasound testing is probably a weakness.

Edit: Sound passes through tungsten and gold at significantly different rates. Also, a "mixed media" type material would have extra "echos" that a homogenous thing would not.

Maybe a Differential Thermal Analysis/Thermomechanical Analysia? I suspect gold and tungsten have different behaviours when heated, and that should tell both apart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_thermal_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermomechanical_analysis

They have different magnetic susceptibilities. Gold is diamagnetic (repelled by magnetism); tungsten is paramagnetic (attracted). A strong magnetic field (neodymium magnets) and sensitive scales can tell them apart. I built a small rig a few years ago with parts from Aliexpress that worked for coins and for bars it's just scaling it up.

Looks like tungsten has more than twice the electric resistivity of gold. Setting up a conductivity test shouldn't be too hard.

Because of electrical current preferring the path of least resistance (the gold instead of the tungsten), and because of the Skin effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect), I suspect such a test would be inaccurate. Especially given how thick the plating is in these particular bars.

A high current test might work, albeit with some undesirable side effects :)

No skin effect for the direct current you could normally use to measure resistance. Accurately measuring the resistance of something as large as a metal bar can be tricky, but the gold would help as it does not oxidize on the surface.

The skin effect happens exclusively on alternating currents, and you will need a fairly high frequency for it to become a problem on the size gold bars usually have. So, no, it's completely irrelevant here.

Who doesn’t run chemical and x-ray fluorescence tests on their knickknacks?

To identify a gold-plated object, those would have to be done in a destructive manner, i.e. after scratching the object.

In many cases that would not be acceptable, so non-destructive tests may be used, e.g. based on density or X-ray absorption, but those are inconclusive, because tungsten also passes them.

When scratching the object is allowed, then there is little need for a complex test, as the change of color would be enough to show a fake.

Product description tells us that the gold plating is 1/16" thick (~1.6 mm), and that such thick plating of gold is necessary to fool x-ray testing. I don't know how invasive scratch tests are but I imagine the carving to be shallower than 1.6 mm. Their product is clearly and thoroughly designed for counterfeiting.

It is clearly designed for counterfeiting. If your concern and interests are truly limited to trade shows, I’m sure an ingot of steel painted gold would suffice.

If only they invested as much energy into spellchecking. I expect these come stamped "99.99 per cent gold".

Same as "massage toy" on AliExpress

"solvent trap"

> Notice: Chinatungsten Online (Xiamen) Manu.&Sales Corp. is a very professional and serious company, specializing in manufacturing and selling tungsten related products for more than two decades. Our gold-plated tungsten bar and tungsten alloy golden bar are only for souvenir and decoration purpose. We can provide all kinds of tungsten alloy golden bar as your requirements. Here we declare: Please do not use our gold-plated tungsten alloy bar and tungsten alloy golden bar for any illegal purpose.

Oh good, I'm sure nothing bad will happen since they wrote the disclaimer.

How much does tungsten cost per kg in solid bulk form?

Peanuts compared to gold

The expensive part here is the 1/16 inch gold around the tungsten to fool x-ray scanners, they say that's enough to prevent x-rays from reaching the tungsten.

Around US$ 40,000/tonne, $40/kg. Roughly a dollar an ounce, vs nearly $2000 for gold.

with a thick gold plating ? They must have ways to get really cheap gold.

Long time reader but first time poster, had to share a story.

A decade ago was riding a bus in China, and they had a PSA type ad playing on the screens (paraphrased) "making sure when you're buying gold you distinguish investment (real) gold bars and decorative (fake) gold bars".

I thought "wow, how bad of a problem it must be to need such a PSA".

> In theory, as the density of uranium is 19.1g/cm3, which is approximately 70% denser than lead, tungsten gold plated bar and tungsten alloy gold bar could be used as material of making fake gold products.

Why does this article begin talking about Uranium and lead and then immediately non sequitur into tungsten? There must be something I'm missing?

I was wondering the same. Is this part 2 of a series or something?

Ha. So I searched with the first phrases, and there are multiple results that are identical. But then there's this :"In theory, as its density is 19.1g/cm3, which is approximately 70% denser than lead, uranium could be used as material of making fake coin. However, it is weakly radioactive and not as dense as gold, so it does not appear to be a practical method. Then people have discovered that tungsten is environmental-friendly, durable and hardness, the most important is that its density of 19.25g/cm3 is just about the same density as gold (19.3g/cm3), which bears the similar specific gravity." So I guess someone copy pasted a mistake that someone did when shortening the original version.

http://news.chinatungsten.com/en/tungsten-dart-news/46-tungs...

That is an obvious typo. The intention must have been to write "uranium" everywhere in that paragraph, instead of "tungsten".

Uranium and tungsten are the 2 metals which have about the same density as gold, so they can be used to fake gold. The only alternative would be to use alloys of rhenium, osmium, iridium or platinum (or also neptunium, but that is too expensive and too radioactive), but that would be pointless because such alloys would be too expensive.

Nevertheless, when I have read the paragraph for the first time, I have not spotted the error, because it is also true that tungsten is weakly radioactive.

The majority of the chemical elements heavier than the rare-earth elements, with a few exceptions (lead, gold, mercury and iridium) are weakly radioactive, but their radioactivity is several orders of magnitude lower than that of thorium and uranium.

"only for souvenir and decoration purpose. ... Please do not use our gold-plated tungsten alloy bar and tungsten alloy golden bar for any illegal purpose."

ya, sure, that's why you make them so they pass chemical tests, x-rays, etc, etc.

https://vm-vision.eu/nl/toepassingen/edelemetalen1/ sounds interesting to detect these.

"X-ray fluorescence is a very reliable way to confirm the purity, but XRF is a surface technique. Some precious metals processors have even resorted to drilling or cutting bars to verify integrity. However, a simple ultrasonic test can quickly and reliably locate inserts with no need to drill, cut, or otherwise alter the bar."

Personally I only deal with gold-pressed latinum:

* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Latinum

* https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Gold-Pressed_Latinum

Who mourns for morn?

Unrelated but fascinating: I have recently seen a group of people who acquired a 50 lb tungsten cube. At first it seems like a weird thing to spend a few thousand dollars to have but then everyone who interacts with it is fascinated by it, even describing the experience as life changing. Example: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR7gry3o/ and https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR7gJ3VB/

Better not drop this on your foot...

> even describing the experience as life changing.

Holding unusually dense materials for the first time is trippy in that it breaks your expectations of how things should feel.

But describing it as life changing is just influencers being influencers. Exaggerating everything into hyperbole is part of the job when you’re angling for more views on TikTok.

Haha exactly. I have a 1oz gold coin 9999 fine and me and the few people who held it had the same reaction. Whoa that’s heavier than I expected! Anyway as I was saying…

Still waiting for someone to have a religious experience with it

It is life changing if you drop it on your foot.

I bought a tiny Tungsten cube. Even a tiny one feels unreal when you hold it in your hands.

I probably spent 5 minutes playing around with tungsten welding electrodes when I first bought some. There is something pleasing about the density.

I think it's so interesting for people because so much of our concept of reality and how the world works is down to our experience. Then you encounter something contrary to that experience and it kind of forces you to realize, evem for just a minute that your understanding is largely a connecting of the dots of your own limited sampling of a much larger thing.

This video gives me a similar vibe. https://youtu.be/Pp9Yax8UNoM

does this youtuber/tiktoker have their arms up in the air and their eyes popping out of their head and affiliate links below? i have handled tungsten, it's cool, but not dissimilar to handling weights for working out

Can't quite call it life changing, but I bought a smaller cube as a Christmas present (half joking, half novelty. Dumb shit you buy your brother type stuff.). Well, when it arrived the joke was on me because it was genuinely such an interesting object. I regretted having to give it away.

Then for some reason, by the time I got around to buying myself one, they'd become a "cool" thing online and the price exploded. Oh well.

Why are they all dressed like first graders?

Well that was terrible; they managed to combine unboxing and reaction video genres.

I would assume real gold bars of this size would have some kind of notion of a certificate of provenance and/or authenticity stamped into it or associated with it, e.g. specific symbols or ID numbers that would fall under international forgery laws if duplicated. Because one and 10 troy oz bars come with loads of identification. Of course those can be faked too, but who would be dumb enough to trade in dubious unmarked "gold bars"? The only answers I can come up with sound like James Bond plots.

Isn’t it rather the point of precious metals as a class is that their value does not depend on things like provenance.

Maybe the hypothetical "market price" of gold works that way, but in practical selling and buying provenance can be used as a shortcut for independently determining purity. If you want your buyer to just accept your "gold" without testing, if you have gold without provenance, you're just going to have to accept a discount on your sale.

Consider the difference between "merely" 99% and 99.99% gold. On a 1oz coin, that's like ~200USD of value right there.

You're off by a factor of ten, 1oz of gold is ~2K so it's a 20 USD difference.

Given that companies in China are blatantly selling forgeries of US gold coins[1], it appears that they aren't too worried about the consequences. Though maybe it would start to attract more attention if they began counterfeiting larger value items such as these gold bars.

[1] https://m.alibaba.com/product/60579932545/Gold-Plated-Tungst...

It's always fun to read about tungsten, I guess with the high density and weird texture the literal meaning in Swedish makes sense: tung=heavy and sten=rock so heavy rock. :)

Edit: autocorrect.

This reminds me of those YouTube videos where people melt their copper scrap into ingots and then when they go to the scrapyard they are reminded that the scrapyard guy will have to cut their beautiful bars to confirm that they are actually made out of copper or they simply refuse them to start with.

I really want a tungsten gold plated bar now. I wonder how much they cost. I doubt it’s actually cheap enough for me to buy it just for fun but my god would it be satisfying.

$250-500 per 1 oz bar:

https://m.alibaba.com/product/60724849535/1oz-tungsten-fille...

I have lots of tungsten carbide scrap. Apart from recycling, what are other good idea ?