When you buy gold bullion bars these days you expect the metal to be pure gold but recently fake bars are being sold around the world and one of them was detected in the U.K. filled with tungsten. Detecting fake gold bullion is important to ensure that you retain the value of your gold bars.

When you purchase gold bars you expect them to be real gold bars, not fake. Fake gold bullion bars are those which have had the gold drilled out of them and the gold replaced by tungsten. Tungsten is a similar weight to gold and so the difference is not easily detected at once. But if you weight the bar there can be enough of a difference to warrant further inspection.

Many of these ‘gold’ bars can be in existence undetected as it is rare that anyone actually tests every individual gold bar they have. So when you buy gold make sure your product is pure gold and not fake. You can check for tungsten in the gold bars by melting them down and separating the different metals. Each metal melts at a different temperature so for example tungsten melts at a higher temperature than gold. This can be an expensive project.

Another way to detect fake gold bars is to weight them but the different weight between tungsten and gold is very hard to detect.

Here the ultrasonic instrument is coming to your rescue. It shows you whether the big gold bar has metal of consistent characteristics(pure gold). Or if it has a void area with tungsten buried below some millimeters of fine gold. Testing small bars, even if they are sealed in plastic foil (less than 0.5 mm thick) takes only a few seconds.

Finally, when you are buying gold bars make sure you are dealing with a reputable dealer and if you are buying large quantities of bars check them with an ultrasonic instrument.

Via EPR Network
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