I’m in the UK, where it might be a little more difficult. One thing’s for sure, I won’t be meeting Mr Smith in a multi-story car park to hand over my gold in exchange for a bag of fifties.
I think my best bet would be to make it untraceable by smelting it down to smaller bars and then devise some way of “finding” it. Maybe take up metal dectectoring or remodeling old houses. When I “find” the gold, I would take it to the authorities and go through the no doubt tedious and lengthy process of claiming it as mine.
Melting gold is not extremely difficult, an oxyacetylene torch would make it rather easy. I also encourage the use of fire whenever the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. However, if someone is unable to melt the gold down it would not be difficult to cut the ingot up into smaller pieces and pound them down into unidentifiable chunks with a hammer.
Naturally occurring gold nuggets rarely exceed a gram or two in weight so you’d have to do a lot of work to convince anyone you found that much gold by prospecting. But you don’t need to do that, if it’s found on your own property, excluding special mineral rights assigned to someone else, then it’s yours. And here in the US there are many public locations where you can keep any gold you find.
Gold is easy to sell and I have done it numerous times. One of the problems for the international brokers is gold is in fact, not traceable. You can’t run an XRF gun over it and say, “this came from Spain”. I sold my race car to a jeweler back around 1980. We had an agreement that he would make 3 payments. When I delivered the car he also told me I could take it out in trade from anything in his store at wholesale cost, not marked up to retail. I think he expected me to buy diamonds or something ( I did take a large heart shaped ruby)… I pointed to the case of Krugerrands. He obviously had not anticipated that but he did pay for the car at spot value, no less. I went home with a very heavy duffle bag.Gold was on the rise so after a few months I sold it to a large local jeweler He also gave me spot since gold was really shooting up. I probably should have held it for awhile.
The problem with this is that you lose the value of the silver you would have to buy to make 14K or 18K gold alloy. Scrap gold dealers only pay for the gold. They don’t know if it is alloyed with silver, copper, tin or whatever. Now if you could locate someone who refines gold they might buy the silver value also.
If the choice is between a smaller profit and someone figuring out that you are using highly-refined gold and hey, didn’t a bar go missing a while back?..it would be worth the lower profit.
I actually bought an unmarked lump of gold colored metal at an auction for $50 becasue no one was sure if it was actually gold or not. I took it to a well know buyer in the area that gave 90-95% of the spot price for gold and showed it to him along with several other pieces I was parting with in order to put a down paymnet on my house. He examined it and found different levels of gold throughout the lump, 12K here and 10K there and 14K in a couple of places. He told me that thieves will take rings and chains and melt them down with a torch to make such lumps. And then he bought it for $450.
That’s the twilight zone of valuable stuff. Do you legitimately own it or is there some chance it can be shown to belong to someone else. The more it leans towards ‘not really your gold’ the greater the discount. As I said above, if I knew it was hot gold I’d happily take half to have it out of my hands.
Bullion gold is eminently traceable, in multiple ways. Not all of which I’m willing to divulge online, but just the isotope signatures alone are as good as fingerprints. Your only safe bet there is mixing multiple gold sources. And, trust me, they could still find you out by other means if it was worth their effort .
I can verify that that’s true in our town. We’ve had a few reasons to compare prices and the coin shop was always the best.
The worst was those places that send you an envelope to send your gold to them. Even if the company says they specialize in dental gold and you got their envelope from your dentist, the coin shop will give you a better deal. They have a tool to break the tooth away from the gold and they check the price of gold in real time. At least our coin shop did.
These “Good Delivery” bars are roughly 400 oz. Troy, give or take. The weight varies. The thing is, they don’t ordinarily ever leave the exchange, like the Comex or whatever. They are used to satisfy futures contracts (on paper usually) Before they are accepted into the exchange, they are assayed. It’s much easier to buy and sell, and not actually take physical delivery. They don’t encourage this, but they will. But once it leaves the exchange, now it’s just a pig in a poke.
SO, if you have one, the problem with selling it, it would have to be assayed again. I think outfits like Kitco would have no problem buying. Does the Postal Service provide insurance to $800,000? Be sure to have someone sign for it on their end.
Melting it down would make no sense, because now you have an unrecognizeable lump of unknown (to the buyer) purity or fineness. So they will buy it, but at a discount to the normal price of .999 fine gold.
A recent BBC series had a few solutions based on the real life Brinks Mat gold heist.
One group set up a ‘cash for gold’ company which had dual benefits. It provided a source of scrap gold of lower quality to water down the bullion with, and also provided a reasonable excuse for selling so much gold.
Another group set up a fake gold mine in a corrupt african country and claimed the gold came from there.
That’s interesting. I guess the technology has come a long way since the news program on the gold trade I saw several years ago. But I think that particular concern was not bullion gold, just remelted jewelry and such. On one of the Gold Rush episodes this year the Parker Schnabel crew had their weekly weighing from three different sluices. Each pile of gold was a different color and the sources were only a few hundred yards apart.