Yes, even people who work as precious metals buyers can be scammed. In my defense, I was relatively new at the time. My customer, a man, brought what I thought was real bullion coins. It was a fractional set, meaning each coin was a different weight. The largest coin was 1/2 ounce while the other three were smaller. The weird part is the front of the coins looked normal, yet the backs were flat with no design. For those unfamiliar, bullion coins are designed to look real with a front and back like normal coins. I thought maybe these coins had the backs intentionally melted or flattened. I should have suspected they were fake because flat backs is the first clue I overlooked.
Initially, I thought the reason the backs were flat was because someone tried to turned bullion into something like jewelry. It was odd enough I asked my co-worker to look at them. She made the same mistake I did: she thought they were real. I noticed that she did not flip the coins over to see the backs of them. She only saw the front. Given that we both accepted the coins were real, I went ahead and bought them at scrap value because that’s the rule when bullion is altered in some way like turning it into jewelry. I neglected one simple test.
When you have bullion that is suspicious for any reason, start by weighing each piece separately. Let’s say you have a 1 ounce coin of alleged gold. Put each piece on a gram scale. One troy ounce equals 31.1034807 grams. A fake 1 ounce of bullion will weigh something different than 31.104807. If I had weighed each coin I would have immediately realized they were fake because none of them would have accurate weights. I could have performed a physical test on the bullion and I could have scanned them, which is more accurate than a physical test. Why didn’t I? A partial answer is pressure to buy.
If a person works in a sales oriented job, the goal is to SELL, SELL, SELL as much as you can. Yay capitalism. When you work as a precious metals buyer, there is pressure on you to BUY, BUY, BUY, convincing every customer to sell to you. This is especially true when a customer brings in gold, silver, and platinum because they are the bread-and-butter of the precious metals business. When you are a gold buyer, many customers either assume or hope their stuff is highly valuable which leads to disappointment when you tell them how much their stuff is actually worth. Disappointed customers is common. There’s an art to convincing a disappointed customer. Giving quotes is one way to convince them.
The store I worked at had two advantages. They have a scanner that the other businesses don’t have and they give customers quotes. If we give a quote, the customer might take our quote to another gold business who will offer the customer more money. Boo capitalism. This means we lost a sale. Sometimes, we give a quote and the customer returns to us to sells. This means we gained a sale. Some customers need time to time about whether they actually want to sell or find/wait a better price.
I felt some level of pressure to buy his suspicious looking bullion and that lead to more than one mistake. I paid him nearly $2000. He left the store happy. A couple hours later, my co-worker asks “Hey, why do these coins that you bought have no backs?” My stomach dropped. I felt the sickening, immediate realization I fell for a scam. Fortunately, my co-worker and I had juuuuust enough time to convince the bank that issues the company cheques to put a “stop payment” on his $2000 cheque. I breathed the biggest sigh of relief annnnnnd still got in trouble with the boss. You know how some people can be so angry at you they don’t say anything. That’s the level of angry. They knew that I knew how badly I fucked up.
One frustrating aspect of working at that store was how it was managed. The boss was more annoyed when we gave quotes to customers than when we made mistakes, like buying fake bullion, that cost the store money. Every time we give quotes, it’s usually a written quote. There’s a paper record of every quote we give. Each quote is viewed by management as a “lost sale.” Depending on how good you are at precious metal buying, you might have few quotes and few mistakes. Unfortunately, I had many quotes aka “lost sales” and few mistakes. In the period of time I worked there, the amount of quotes I gave was over $10,000 and the mistakes were less than $1000. Management interprets the $10.000 in quotes as me losing sales, aka a bad buyer. I had a difficulties because I thought avoiding mistakes was the point when it’s actually avoiding quotes.
When I complained to my co-worker how frustrating it is worrying about quotes, she said “That’s why I avoid writing quotes. I tell the customer roughly what their stuff is worth.” Technically, her method is not what management trains us to do. It’s a situation where I could’ve followed her lead and not give customers written quotes, but it’s against what I was trained to do. I was more afraid about getting in trouble again. It wasn’t long before I quit that place.
TL;DR beware of fake bullion. If you have suspicious bullion one simple test is verify the weight with a gram scale.