It certainly would be a top contender in the Most Money You’ve Lost in the Stupidest Way thread.
This. I’ve read enough stories of someone finding a bunch of cash on the side of the road, only to find out it was the life savings/critical amount of cash to someone that I’d feel guilty about keeping it.
OTOH, I wouldn’t turn it over to the police, as they’d likely keep it themselves under that asset forfeiture bullshit. I’d put ads up in the local paper and Craigslist, keeping it a bit vague, and see if it got claimed.
Do you have a cutesy rhyme to support your position?
I rest my case.
ETA: weeper.
No Country For Old Men
Cite? I’m actually curious, I’ve never seen gold moved OUT of the vault at the NY Federal Reserve. But I’ve been inside the vault 3 times and the gold isn’t wrapped in any way while in storage, it’s just stacked in secondary cages with multiple locks inside the main vault. And there is no shrink wrap machinery inside the vault. They do store shrink wrapped bundles of cash inside the vault, though.
I’m not sure your supposition on how the gold is moved takes into account the weight, you probably can’t load a up pallet of gold like it was pallet of bricks. And the guys that work at a vault may be exaggerating or making up the story about the lost brick, but if they do they tell it consistently.
Gold fever makes funny things happen. A dozen years ago or so the Providence RI police confiscated a box full of gold coins from a pawn shop because they were suspected to be stolen. Some time later the coins were proven to be legitimately owned by the pawn shop. When they picked up the box of coins at the police station half for them were missing. This was obviously many thousands of dollars in missing coins. The police went through the list of usual excuses, they returned all the coins they had confiscated, there was no record of any more coins, the pawn shop was mistaken, they couldn’t have been misplaced…, and of course the pawn shop went to court to recover their property. A few weeks later all the coins were suddenly found, they say. No doubt some had been pilfered from the property room and the chief let it be known they had better have been misplaced and better be found. I suspect not every last one was found either but the pawn shop and the police reached some kind of deal, I’m sure they interacted in a lot of ways besides this case.
So if I found that gold brick I’d have to turn it over to the police, but my mind would be spinning with ideas for somehow keeping that gold.
IIRC bricks of gold mislaid by poor persons tend to be smallish bricks.
What’s the difference between the 99.9 test and the 99.99 test? Does 99.99 gold have significantly different texture or flexibility than 99.9 gold? Anyway, my guess is that the 99.9 tester would never notice that the item is 99.99
(Ninja’ed by Pazu.) This sounded familiar, but in the story I recalled (posted 6 weeks ago at SDMB) the ploughman got cheated. (The 14-day deadline to report the treasure had expired.)
Possibly noting casual, but if someone was known to be missing a brick of gold and something reasonably suspicious showed up, a mass spectrometer (or similar serious lab equipment) could probably tell.
If you’re ever in Ottawa, the Royal Canadian Mint is worth a visit. In the show room, they have a gold brick on display. You’re allowed to pick it up to see its heft. (You can’t walk off with it, given the chain and the friendly security guard whose job is to watch the brick.)
I was hoping they would have one of the million dollar gold coins on display, but not so, apparently.
Wasn’t that the mint where an employee was smuggling coins out in his butt?
Around here, you are required to show ID at pawn shops, which are still a location for fencing stolen goods anyway. (Or were, back when I knew drug addicts). There is no good system for locating stolen goods, there is no good system for identifying most stolen goods, and the addicts used to just take their chances.
As far as I can see, the only thing limiting it now is that stuff from China (including cheap jewellery and tools ) is so cheap that the price point for stolen goods has collapsed.
Yes, but it wasn’t coins - pucks about the diameter of a golf ball, made for assay purposes.
“Mint employée guilty of smuggling $190K in rectum”
Stated differently, the police — suspicious for some external reason — would have ordered the 99.99 test instead of the 99.9 test, which is where my post was driving.
But what are you measuring against? Did the original owner do a test before it was lost? Without a comparison (and done on the same or similar equipment in the same or similar way), all you have are numbers.
A gold bar is refined to a specific fineness. 24 karat gold jewelry is refined to a lower fineness. Therefore, if a piece of jewelry has the fineness of a gold bar instead of the fineness of jeweler’s gold, then you know that it was made from a gold bar not jeweler’s gold. You are measuring against the standards for refining.
And this proves ownership how?
I’ll leave you to flog that straw man on your own–you are doing a fine job.
It’s your straw man.
Time to study to become a Jeweler . . .
Though a man be made of straw, that is no justification for another to own him, nor to strike him. (US Constitution)