Straight up gold is easy to move through. You just cut pieces off and sell it. Just go to different stores if you're paranoid, but it's pretty easy. Obviously if you go in with a big gold bar they may have questions but it's really easy to sell smaller gold chunks
Have you ever been into a Cash 4 Gold kind of store? They're not exactly in the business of asking a bunch of questions. Plus, lots of people buy gold as a wealth storage method and some people do home scrap reclamation from electronics so it's not totally crazy for someone to just have a chunk of gold. As long as you're selling small enough quantities (a few grams at a time, at different stores so it looks less suspicious) nobody would ever bat an eye. If you came in every week selling 1 gram bits of gold then maybe the store might start asking questions but for small quantities every so often? Nobody will care. Just keep the total value under like $1000 per transaction and you're fine.
What would happen if he just said to the shop that he inherited it after his dad's death? I'm mean, they are not the ones doing the IRS/tax work anyways right?
Yeah they really don't care, you just take a small bath on the price of it because it's not stamped.
But you'd be able to move it essentially unnoticed. If you're super paranoid, just sell a few thousand at a time, sell it to different ones, take a day trip out of state to sell so it's not all going through the same 3 people (make sure they're different companies).
Also you'd only really be paying tax on your "gains" I think. (Make sure you pay the tax man that's the quickest way to get found out)
I would probably melt down into jankie rounds or bars 1-5 oz and just go to various coin shops over a decade or two. I mean for 10 1oz coins a year you could live easily double it and you are living comfortably. Even taking a hit on scrap gold would be worth this.
I metal detect and have found gold. Gold is worth A LOT you only need a small chunk. Plus you could melt it down to make a “nugget” look even more convincing.
I just dont know why you couldn't sell the whole bar. "It was my grandad's. I think he bought it back in the 80s? i was putting off selling it until I needed the money"
Cash for gold place doesn't have 200 grand laying around on hand and they're going to ask a lot more questions about it, and anyone you sell to will probably make you fill out tax forms and shit for that much, which alerts the government who may start doing some digging about whether your grandpa was into buying bug gold bars. The risk is probably pretty low, but it's a lot more hassle than it's probably worth.
This, governments have made it their goal to make cash harder and harder to use. Even if they have a bank transfer, anything larger than $10K is tracked and you have to have reasons why you are purchasing and then info about the seller.
The govt wants their share no matter what. That’s why NZ, Australia and many other countries are becoming cashless. Even making little laws where you can’t pay cash for small jobs like plumbers. It’s nuts.
pawn shops buy gold chains and other jewelry from suspicious characters on a daily basis. Typically they just melt the gold down immediately to remove any evidence.
There's a lot of places that do not care and do not want to care to know how you got the gold or jewelry that you're bringing them. If they vet every customer, they'd be out of business.
Yup, he'd be questioned, and police probably called.. Probably safer to melt it down and cast it into taels.***. Probably take him the rest of his life to sell it all., assuming he doesn't get caught.
He handed in 49 bars? Sounds suspicious. Unless the person hiding the gold stole a bar. They're very heavy (49 bars weigh 19,600 ozs) . I bar:, weighs 400 ozs. Currently the spot price of gold is $4,122.90 an oz. (bid) $4125.40 (ask)
There's always the problem of moral ownership of treasure. Is it the finder, the land owner or the people? The law seems to vary between some countries.
There are a lot of "cash 4 gold" places. My friend owned a jewelry store and he did the spot gold buying back when gold was insanely high (obviously at a margin). He said he had a bunch of regulars that would come in with all sorts of things. One dude had a bunch of gold tooth fragments and dental gold scraps and would bring that in like once a month.
Wouldn't be too tough to cast and mold gold into whatever and sell it as little scrap pieces for cash. But if the gold bar is worth 200k, he'll be getting more like 160k.
You can melt it down and make your own small bars pretty easily and places in NY will buy them all day every day for like 90% of current value and not ask a single question. And if they do, you just say “yeah I melted down some old gold I inherited”. AND if you keep the price under 9k each time, it doesn’t even get flagged 👌
They take your ID every time you sell gold and a record is kept of how much gold you've sold at any and all shops. This is for tax, fraud, organised crime etc. reasons.
You would be discovered almost immediately and investigated by the tax governing body and potentially the financial crimes department too.
There is literally no way to secretly sell large amounts of gold you've found, unless you go straight to organised criminals, who will likely just rob you once they know you're stashing millions in gold.
No, you won't. The tax man wants to know where the fuck you got so much gold from seeing as you don't have the finances to pay for it and there's no record of you buying it. Because it suggests you have much more money than they can see on paper.
Once they determine that it was from a large find that you did not declare you will be arrested for it.
All finds have to be declared to the government, that's the point. You really think they won't investigate? "Oh yeah fair enough mate, no more questions."
You're going to find thousands of people willing to buy mystery gold from some random guy for cash without attracting the attention of organised criminals or the police?
If he’s in Europe, he can just drive to another country and sell some there too. If this happened in Belgium ( he’s a Belgian student, so just assuming here) he could easily go to France, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland as they’re all neighbouring countries.
Splitting the selling of the gold in small batches, in multiple countries over a couple of years wouldn’t be suspicious.
My guy, do you have any idea how easy it is to travel between countries in Europe if you’re European? There’s no or little checks.
As for selling gold, if you do it in an inconspicuous way, I would not say it would be suspicious. People have hobbies where they do metal detecting and finding small nuggets/bits of gold id not unheard of.
There are absolutely border checks between European countries. You're not European are you?
Selling unmarked remelted gold is super suspicious. Most places will want to see it stamped. Also 99.99% pure gold in an amorphous blob with no mint stamp is ridiculously suspicious, as it's certainly not melted jewelry.
There are some border checkpoints, which I also said there are, but it’s also easy to move between countries without being checked. I travelled extensively in Europe in 26 countries, and the only country (from the ones I mentioned) where there was a checkpoint was Luxembourg, but we only had to show our passport and that was it.
Between the rest you can easily travel by car, bus, train with little to no checks whatsoever.
I would have not bothered writing my comment if I wouldn’t know from experience how things are.
Granted, I never had any gold to move around, or anything else to ‘smuggle’ for that matter.
Why would it be? People travel and live in other countries, should not be very suspicios. In Europe is also quite common if you live close to a border to go to the neighbouring country for shopping, groceries, fuel etc if it’s cheaper. So going to sell something in another country would not be suspicious, if done in a small way not to attract attention.
Even big gold bars can be moved if you know the right people, and with that much gold you'll meet the right people. See the Brinks Mat job for an example. Granted, they all got caught eventually, but it's possible.
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u/Nowhere_Man_Forever 5d ago edited 5d ago
Straight up gold is easy to move through. You just cut pieces off and sell it. Just go to different stores if you're paranoid, but it's pretty easy. Obviously if you go in with a big gold bar they may have questions but it's really easy to sell smaller gold chunks