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President Donald Trump announced Monday that he had located a gold-painted golf club given to him by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — one of dozens of presents from foreign leaders sought by House Democrats. “I am pleased to report that after a search, we were able to find the gold (paint!) Driver given to me by my friend & former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe,” Trump, 76, announced on his Truth Social platform.“It was in a locker, with other clubs, at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach County, Florida. It has never been used,” he...

According to multiple industry reports published this week, the Wuhan-based, NASDAQ-listed Kingold Jewelry issued 83 tonnes of alleged gold -- valued at $4.2 billion and the equivalent to 22 percent of the country's gold -- as collateral to obtain loans from at least 14 Chinese money lenders and trust banks. Except the "gold" in the bars is suspected of being gilded copper. "This is hardly surprising; most of the fakes we see in our business are coming out of China," Michael Wittmeyer, a gold expert for JMBullion.com. "There are replica products of what we sell online, and while people pay...

More than a dozen Chinese financial institutions, mainly trust companies, loaned 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) over the past five years to Wuhan Kingold Jewelry Inc. with pure gold as collateral and insurance policies to cover any losses. Kingold is the largest privately owned gold processor in central China's Hubei province. Its shares are listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. The company is led by Chairman Jia Zhihong, an intimidating ex-military man who is the controlling shareholder. What could go wrong? Well, plenty, as at least some of 83 tons of gold bars used as collateral turned...

A team of Chinese researchers have turned cheap copper into a new material “almost identical” to gold, according to a study published in peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on Saturday. The discovery will significantly reduce the use of rare, expensive metals in factories, said the authors. Professor Sun Jian and colleagues at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Liaoning, shot a copper target with a jet of hot, electrically charged argon gas. The fast-moving ionised particles blasted copper atoms off the target. The atoms cooled down and condensed on the surface of a collecting...

The Royal Canadian Mint is investigating how a sealed, "pure gold" wafer with proper mint stampings may in fact be a fake. The one-ounce gold piece, which was supposed to be 99.99 per cent pure, was purchased by an Ottawa jeweller on Oct. 18 at a Royal Bank of Canada branch. Yet tests of the bar show it may contain no gold at all. When neither the mint nor RBC would take the bar back, jeweller Samuel Tang contacted CBC news.

Over the past several years, incidents involving fake gold (usually in the form of gold-plated tungsten) have emerged every so often, usually involving Manhattan's jewerly district, some of Europe's bigger gold foundries, or the occasional billion dealer. But never was fake gold actually discovered in the form monetary gold, held by a bank as reserve capital and designed to fool bank regulators of a bank's true financial state. This changed on Friday when Russia's "Admiralty" Bank, which had its banking license revoked last week by Russia's central bank, was reportedly using gold-plated metal as part of its "gold reserves." According...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Gold-colored bars seized by US forces in Iraq appear to be melted-down shell casings made mostly of copper, rather than gold, the White House said in a report obtained yesterday.</p> <p>The US military announced the discovery of truckloads of the gold-colored bars in May.</p>

Tyler Durden 06/06/2014 Two years ago, stories of fake tungsten-filled gold coins and bars began to spread; it appears, between the shortage of physical gold (after Asian central bank buying) and the increase in smuggling (courtesy of India's controls among others) that gold fraud is back on the rise. As SCMP reports, a mainland China businessman, Zhao Jingjun, discovered that HK$270 million of 998kg of gold bars he bought in Ghana had been swapped for non-precious metal bars. What is perhaps even more worrisome, given the probe into commodity-financing deals and the rehypothecation evaporation; these gold bars were shipped to...

German TV station ProSieben finds what appears to be some evocative proof of gold counterfeiting, in the form of tungsten gold substitutes coming to the W.C.Heraeus foundry, which is the world's largest privately-owned precious metals refiner and fabricator, located in Hanau, Germany. The foundry has isolated at least one 500-gram tungsten bar due for melting, originating from a (so far) unnamed bank, which as the head of the foundry stated made the unpleasant discovery that "not all the glitters is gold."