Are your gold bars "tungsten salted"

[lovuian]

Why Tungsten?

If anyone were contemplating creating “fake” gold bars, tungsten 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.


I don't know if this is possible
but thought I would feel you guys out if you heard about this scam

[Posteritatis]

1. Alas, I have relatively few gold bars. (nt)

[DJ13]

2. Gld ETF Warning, Tungsten Filled Fake Gold Bars

Nov 12, 2009

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 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:

1] - irregularities in the publication of the gold ETF - GLD’s bar list from Sept. 25 – Oct.14 where the length of the bar list went from 1,381 pages to under 200 pages and then back up to 800 or so pages.

2] - reports of 400 oz. “good delivery” bricks of gold found gutted and filled with tungsten within the confines of LBMA approved vaults in Hong Kong.

Why Tungsten?

If anyone were contemplating creating “fake” gold bars, tungsten 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”.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14996.html
Gld ETF Warning, Tungsten Filled Fake Gold Bars :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting Free Website

[lovuian]

5. so I guess it is possible to fake out a person

by just weighing the bar and not checking it thoroughly that its gold all the way
I wonder what is the best way to check your gold bar besides weight?

[htuttle]

3. Hmm... I'll check the next time I get down to my vault

[Ikonoklast]

4. Seen the price of tungsten lately? $13 a lb. or so?

If the core of the bar was tungsten, unless the bar was assayed or melted, it would be a pretty good scam.

[lovuian]

7. Assayed or melted

that is the only way

WOW easy to be screwed

[XemaSab]

6. My gold bars have chocolate in them

:9

[lovuian]

8. the best

:rofl:

[Ikonoklast]

14. If it's decent chocolate, it's worth more than some crummy tungsten!

I'd be long chocolate, but I never seem to accumulate any quantity no matter how much I purchase.

Stuff mysteriously disappears for some unknown reason....

[Robb]

9. This is why my vault is exclusively filled with pennies.

Plus, you can row around in them. I learned this early.

[lovuian]

10. wouldn't it be somethin

if Fort Knox gold was "tungsten salted"

how would they know????

no one assays every gold bar or melts them to make sure

[Libertas1776]

11. I need tungsten to live! Tungsten!!!

:silly:

[me b zola]

34. What is more important to humanity: cannabis or tungsten

:D

[lovuian]

41. chocolate

is more important :)

[Techn0Girl]

12. Unfortunately the density of tungsten and gold are NOT the same (of course) ...

The density of gold is generally given as 19.32 g/mL

The density of tungsten is 19.25 g/cm3.

Which is probably why all the worlds gold supply hasn't been replaced by ... tungsten ... by some master criminal .

Two different elements...two different weights...two different densities.

[lurky]

16. 0.07 g per cubic centimeter

is a pretty small difference. 0.36% of the total weight. I bet someone could add a few extra grams of gold to the outside of a fake bar and make it weigh what was expected without being noticeably larger. Not that I believe or disbelieve the reports.

[Speck Tater]

19. It should be possible to make a tungsten/iridium alloy that weighs exactly the same as gold.

iridium is 22.56 g/cc

[ddeclue]

22. OH and P.S. that's also why there's mass spectrometry

[Techn0Girl]

26. Yeah...

I'm amazed that people who own millions and millions in gold bars haven't already twigged on to this simple fact and figured some way around it?

I think you are really on to something there.
And you're probably the first.
Email me - we could be rich I tell ya' ! Rich!

[Techn0Girl]

20. I don't think "density" means what you think it means

[Speck Tater]

35. Density =

Density is mass per unit volume.
Relative Density, or Specific Gravity is what Archimedes shouted Eureka about, because it showed him the way to determine whether gold was pure or not without melting it down.

However, two alloys with the same density can not be distinguished by density or specific gravity alone. A mass spectrometer would only work by vaporizing a sample. But if you cut into the bar then you see, just by looking at the inside of the bar, that it wasn't gold all the way through.

Adding extra gold WOULD make the bar weigh as much as a proper gold bar, but it would also have a greater volume, so the density would still be off. That method would not work.

[Techn0Girl]

36. Googleing someting doesn't mean that you understand something....

I'm not going to argue any of what you say because your knowledge appears to be derived from what you can google up at the moment.

Suffice it to say that gold has been around for a pretty long time now <ahem>. If any of what you were saying had merit than we would have known about someone pulling off a great theft based on the idea.

You can't just google up random facts put them together any which way, throw in a pinch of jargon and expect that you will come off as someone knowing something about the subject. Because you come off as someone who is talking about things they don't really understand.

Not going to argue this anymore - it's rather a waste of time isn't it?

[Speck Tater]

37. Does my MS in Engineering count?

Of course I did my graduate work in physics back in the 1970's, but I seem to recall that the concept of density had been discovered that far back in the olden days. ;)

I really am a nice person. My grandson the history teacher thinks I'm the smartest man he every knew. ;) Although I am a retired aerodynamics engineer, I really am quite well educated on engineering and scientific matters, so I can't help but wonder on what basis you jump to the conclusion that I only know what I have Googled in the last ten minutes. That's really quite an extraordinary claim!

But even more extraordinary to me, as an old fart who grew up in the pre-Internet era, is how rude and insulting people can be to perfect strangers while hiding their identities behind pseudonyms. It's really interesting how discussions on the Internet seem to result in conflating "I disagree with you." with "I am educated and you are ignorant." Perhaps it's the anonymity that emboldens people to insult and denigrate each other in ways they would never do face to face.

As for your claim that someone would already be "pulling off a great theft based on the idea", I'm quite certain that an iridium/tungsten alloy is probably more costly than gold, since iridium is far rarer than gold. So it would hardly be worth while counterfeiting a cheaper metal like gold with a more expensive one like iridium. And that doesn't even take into consideration that the melting point of iridium is nearly as hot as the vaporization point of iron, so alloying it would be outrageously expensive.

And yes, I did just look up those boiling points on Google. My apologies for not having memorized them 39 years ago when I was in graduate school.

[petronius]

42. Aerodynamics isn't the same as metallurgy. I know that from the Google.

:rofl:

What an odd sub-thread; perhaps somebody was replying in the wrong place... :shrug:

[DainBramaged]

45. (quick aside) I have two friends, REAL rocket scientists, named Einstein

and they wear shirts to the neighborhood picnic every year, "yes I REALLY am a rocket scientist".

It sucks that you have to prove your cred to the fools that troll DU.

simple x raying of each bar would show the tungsten core?


http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/how_to_make_fake_gold_bars/


:hi:

[liberal N proud]

13. What's a gold bar?

:sarcasm:

[joshcryer]

15. Ironically, tungsten has many industrial uses, gold, not so much. Yet gold is vauled higher.

Just a consequence of irrational markets.

[Vinnie From Indy]

31. Hardly!

Gold has hundreds of uses beyond jewelry.

[Vinnie From Indy]

33. A $5.00 - $10.00 Voltmeter at any radio shack would catch the fake

Th electrical resistance of gold mixed with tungsten would be caught immediately. Also, Tungsten and gold do in fact have different densities. While small, modern technology could easily catch a mixed bar of gold and tungsten. Forgers could make fake bars with the exact density of gold by adding other dense metals with tungsten and gold to achieve a mixture with the same density of gold.

[eppur_se_muova]

17. BY FAR the world's largest producer of tungsten is ... China.

http://www.tungsteninvestingnews.com/279-west-eager-to-break-chinese-monopoly.html

Lots of tungsten-filled gold products commercially available:
http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/en/alloy11.htm

[Dreamer Tatum]

18. Don't show my wife this thread, please

Also, don't show her a 12 inch ruler.

[XemaSab]

39. .

:D

[ddeclue]

21. Ummm if you have doubts get a blow torch.

If there's tungsten hiding underneath you will find out soon enough.

Tungsten has a much higher melting point than gold.

Oh and they are CLOSE but not the same in specific density. It's easy enough to measure and find out if your gold is really gold.

[Orrex]

23. "You got tungsten in my gold!"

"You got gold in my tungsten!"

[Fla_Democrat]

24. Thanks for the heads up

I'll go down to the vault and check. I may need a forklift and an armored car to transport them to the testing lab. :evilgrin:

[Individualist]

25. My gold bars?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:. etc.

[JVS]

27. Yeah. I can state with certainty that none of my gold bars contain anything at all.

The imagination is a great place to avoid impurities.

[truedelphi]

28. Two of my favorite scams:

A starving artistst who had skills in terms of welding and what not, put together a deposit box that he then went and attached over the real deposit box at the local bank.

(This was before there were security cameras on all our streets.)

Second favorite scam - people who visited the dumpsters of high end restaurants in the wee hours of the morning - and took off with all the empty wine bottles of high pedigree. They then bought the same type of wine (red, or white) and re-filled the bottles with the cheaper brew, and re-sold to restaurants, making a lot of profit.

[NNN0LHI]

29. I think this is the least of my worries. I ain't got no gold bars

I ain't got no gold nothing.

Don

[NoPasaran]

30. Tungsten Salted Gold Bars sounds like a delicious snack food!

Anyone at Nabisco read DU?

[adamuu]

32. This is a plot element from a novel, "Cobra Gold" by Damien Lewis

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-03/how-make-convincing-fake-gold-bars

There are several problems
1. Tungsten has an extremely high melting point. You can't just melt it and pour it into a mold. It's much more difficult than that.
2. There are some potentially detectable differences. Specific gravity is very similar but not identical. Conductivity very different. Speed of sound through the metal is very different.

That doesn't mean it is pure fiction.

[FarCenter]

38. Neutron activation analysis should do the job of detecting tungsten

And if you use a suitably powerful source of neutrons, say a nuclear reactor, your gold bars can be used to heat your house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis

[lovuian]

40. OMG!!! there is a Gold Coin advertisement on this thread ROFL

:rofl: that is perfect
but seriously
when someone buys gold it comes with a certificate that its pure

and how do they make sure it is??? by weight I don't think most purchases get run through a spectroscopy

it seems this would be great if you stole pure gold and replaced it in the vault with "salted Tungsten" gold bars

thanks guys and gals for the great info

[petronius]

43. I'm getting a tungsten ad - just hope none of that tungsten

is contaminated with gold... :)

[Monk06]

44. There is a big difference between certified investment grade gold and scrap gold and used jewelry

It would cost much more money to fake a gold bar
than to just buy investment grade wafer. And no
bank or broker would touch your homemade tungsten
bars. A cage would descend on you and a swat team
would be jamming guns in you face thirty seconds
after you tried.

Although if you insist on going through it there
is a Nigerian former vice President who has sold
two tons of gold and just needs a bank account to
store the cash. Maybe the two of you could get
together.