Sometimes, real life tosses a mystery in your lap and all you can do is thank the Universe. As an avid consumer of true crime, one of the delights of working as a gold buyer is discovering a mystery or learning about a scam. It might be the only delight, to be perfectly honest.

In the short time I worked as a gold buyer, my favorite part was learning about the mysterious Londoner. It’ll be a reasonably short story. One aspect of gold buying are the “regulars” aka people who regularly patron the business for a specific reasons other than the usual ones.

It was common to have regulars that only dealt with bullion and/or coins, and artists who bought silver forks and spoons for crafting projects. The strangest was a mysterious person or group seemingly based in London, England, UK. It involved another aspect of the business: customers around the world can ship items to us gold buyers and we assess the value. The Londoner is my best and most favorite example.

I learned that my bosses had a long-term regular who they believed might be a prolific thief. To my bosses, there were signs that suggested thievery. One was the frequency with which gold was shipped to them for analysis. Shipments were about once per month. That’s weird to a gold buyer because we wonder how is it you are acquiring all that gold every month. Two is the high value of each gold shipment. I was told the mysterious Londoner sends a bar of impure gold that’s worth about $40,000 - $50,000 for analysis. Three, each package has the name of a company that my bosses claim does not exist.

Now, I don’t know how thorough my bosses searched the world wide web for information on the mysterious Londoner and the allegedly London-based company. My bosses found nothing to confirm the London-based company is real. They and I think a thief or group of thieves is behind the phony baloney company name. To a gold buyer it seems unusual because most customers send packages under their own name, not a company name. Anyway, the mystery of who’s acquiring $40,000 - $50,000 every month, melting all that gold, pouring that gold into a bar mold, and shipping it to my employer is my favorite mystery. I will probably never know the answer and that hurts, dammit.

Luckily, I worked there just long enough for the mysterious Londoner to send a package that, shockingly, wasn’t a bar of gold. It was intriguing in one weird way. It was a hodge podge of gold aka bits and pieces of things of various purities. When you take a variety of gold and melt it down, the resulting bar looks dirty, feels crusty, and the color is not the stereotypically bright and shiny golden yellow we all know and love.

Now, what do I mean by “hodge podge of gold"? It means everything in that package was gold but it was a mixture of purities (like 10K, 14K, 18K) and form (jewelry, scrap bits, bullion). Given that we believed a thief is behind these pricey packages, we totally expected to see jewelry. However, the most unique thing were the several short metal pieces that I thought were like cast iron or some other black/dark gray metal. Each piece was similar in appearance. Color was black or dark gray like hematite. Pieces were faceted like they were hexagonal rods. They were under 4 inches long and had rough ends like they were broken off of something like concrete or gray stone. Each piece was 10K gold. I tested each piece several times to make sure. Here’s a lesson, if you find a piece of metal that doesn’t look like gold because you think gold equals yellow, that’s wrong. The color of gold can change by mixing it with different metals.

I often wonder if those little black rods were a clue. I have questions, like hat on Earth requires 10 karat gold black hexagonal rods? How would a thief even know those rods were 10 karat gold? Is the thief primarily a jewel thief? Do they act alone or as part of a group? Do they melt down their ill gotten booty because they think it hides their tracks? Do you melt the gold themselves? Why did they choose to send the bars to another country for analysis? Is there a reason they didn’t use London-base gold buyers?

The TL:DR some people are extremely adept at acquiring $40K-$50K gold per month and looks can be deceiving even for gold because you can change it’s color by mixing gold with other metals. I should’ve titled this post My Favorite Gold Mystery.