Don’t Fall for These 7 “Gold Scams” – Do This Instead

An industry insider’s warning to Americans: don’t fall for gold scams – only buy silver or gold this way or not at all. 

Why I Am Writing This

I run a network of conservative news publications. For about fifteen years, almost every popular gold and silver company in America has approached us to buy advertising.

I turned them all down. Every single one.

The money was real. Some of it was very good money. I said no because I knew what most of them were selling, and I was not willing to put my name behind it. My integrity is not for sale. It never has been.

There is one company that is the exception to that rule. I worked with the founders about fifteen years ago when the company was still called SilverSaver. I have been their paying customer for more than a decade. I have taken physical delivery from them. I currently buy from them every week. That company is OWNx, and they are the first and only gold and silver recommendation I have ever made publicly.

This piece is the long version of why. More specifically, it is the seven tricks I have watched the rest of the industry use, in plain English, with the math, and with no celebrity-endorsed posturing. If your retirement money is anywhere near this category, you should know how the game is actually played before you write the next check.

If you would rather skip the explanation and see the actual cost comparison first, click here.

One Thing Up Front. Gold Itself Is Not the Scam.

I want to be careful here. The headline of this piece is about how precious metals companies trick people. It is not about gold being a bad asset.

Gold is the only asset on earth that settles a debt without creating a new one. It does not depend on a bank, a brokerage, a custodian, a corporation, or a government to be worth what it is worth. That is a real and rare property, and it is why central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold per year in 2022, 2023, and 2024. That is roughly 32 million ounces a year. More than the world’s mines even produce. More than double what the same central banks were buying a decade ago. The people whose actual job is to defend currencies are quietly converting reserves into the one asset that does not depend on anyone else’s promise.

Meanwhile the United States is sitting on nearly $39 trillion in debt with no real plan from either party. You already know that. You read the news.

So the case for owning some gold and silver is honest, and it is durable. The problem is not gold. The problem is the retail industry that grew up around selling it to ordinary people, and the structural incentives baked into how that industry makes money.

Here are the seven tricks, in the order I see them most often.

Trick #1. The “Rare” or “Collectible” Coin Markup

This is the oldest move in the book and it still works on more retirees than any other trick on this list.

You call about gold. The friendly voice on the phone walks you through the case for owning metals, agrees with everything you are worried about, and then steers you, gently, away from plain bullion and toward something they call rare, premium, certified, or limited mintage. The price you are quoted is ten, fifteen, sometimes more than twenty-five percent above the actual gold or silver content of the coin. They tell you this is the smart move. The numismatic premium will appreciate, they say. Collectors will pay more for these later. You are not just buying gold. You are buying a collectible.

You are not. In almost every case, you are buying ordinary bullion at an extraordinary markup, with a story attached.

The day you try to sell it, the dealer who buys it back, if they buy it back at all, is going to pay you the melt value of the metal. The story disappears. The premium evaporates. You eat the spread.

The math is brutal. A 20 percent premium on a $4,700 gold coin is roughly $940 of your money handed to the dealer the moment you say yes. That money is gone before gold has moved a single dollar. Gold has to appreciate roughly 20 percent just for you to be flat. You can see the actual cost difference between this kind of pricing and institutional pricing here.

If you ever hear the words rare, collectible, certified, premium-grade, or limited mintage from a precious metals salesman, the right response is to politely end the call.

Trick #2. The Spread Hidden Behind “Free” Things

The second trick is what good direct-response copywriters call a misdirection.

The advertising promises something free. Free shipping. Free silver. Free safe. Free year of storage. The free item is real. It is sitting on a truck somewhere right now, waiting to be sent to you. What is not advertised is where it came from.

It came from a buy price that is several percent higher than it should be. The free thing is not a gift. It is a piece of your own money handed back to you in a different shape so you do not feel the spread you just paid.

I am not exaggerating when I say that some of the offers I have seen in this industry hide six and seven percent inside a quoted price, then return one or two percent of it to you in the form of an “extra” you did not need.

The honest version is boring. An honest gold dealer charges you a small, transparent premium over the actual cost of the metal, hands you the metal, and that is the entire transaction. No giveaways. No surprise grams of silver. No marketing theater. The company I use, OWNx, charges between 1.99 and 5.99 percent over spot for non-members, and at-cost wholesale pricing for members of their EDGE program at $14.99 a month or $149 a year. There is no theater. The number is the number.

If a gold company is throwing free things at you, ask yourself what they had to charge you to be able to afford it.

Trick #3. The Buyback Trap

This one took me years to fully understand because it does not show up until the day you try to sell.

The big-name retail dealers spend most of their budget acquiring buyers. Buying back from those buyers, on the other hand, is unprofitable for them. So when gold prices spiked sharply over the last six months, several of the biggest names in retail metals quietly slowed their buyback operations to a crawl, paid below-market prices, demanded inspection wait periods of weeks, or simply stopped buying back at all for a window of time.

The customer who wanted to lock in profit could not. The customer who needed cash for a real-life reason got an answer that was technically yes and functionally no.

If you cannot sell, you do not own. You hold.

That is not the same thing.

This is one of the structural reasons OWNx exists, and it is one of the reasons I trust it. OWNx buys back the metal you hold in your OWNx account at the live bid price, instantly, with zero selling fees, twenty-four hours a day from Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon. Not eventually. Not after a wait. Not at a discount. Now. At the screen price.

I have run that test in real money, more than once, in both directions. The exit door works the same way the entry door does. That is the whole game.

Trick #4. The Celebrity Endorsement Tax

Stop and think about this one for a minute.

Every famous person who has been paid to recommend a gold company on radio, on cable news, or on a podcast got paid out of one place. Your purchase. The bigger the endorsement budget, the bigger the spread the company has to charge to fund it. The math is not subtle. You are paying the celebrity to recommend the company that is selling you the coin.

I am not against advertising. I have run an advertising-supported business my entire career. I am against advertising that is paid for by markups that the buyer does not know about and would not approve if they did.

This is also why you will not see Shaun Connell or LiveGoldPrices recommending half the names you have heard on the radio. We were offered all of them. We said no to all of them. The company we eventually said yes to is the one whose pricing structure is published, simple, and verifiable on a screen, not buried under a celebrity’s voice.

If your gut tells you the famous person is the reason you want to buy from a particular company, that is the moment to hang up and look at the actual pricing yourself.

Trick #5. The High-Minimum Lock-In

Most of the big-name gold companies will not even take a serious phone call from you unless you are prepared to commit between $10,000 and $50,000 in one transaction.

That is not because they cannot sell you a smaller amount. It is because they cannot pay their salespeople, their celebrity endorsers, and their marketing budget on a small order. So they design out the small buyer.

The result is a sales pressure structure that does not serve you. You are pushed to commit lump sum, at one price, on one phone call, often by someone who is paid more if you say yes within a particular window. There is no cost averaging. There is no time to think. There is no second pricing point in the deal. Whatever the metals market happens to be doing the day you call is the price you pay for the entire commitment, plus the premium.

This is structurally backwards from how serious people accumulate any monetary asset. Serious people accumulate over time, on autopilot, in small consistent amounts, across many price points. They average their cost. They do not bet the lump on one phone call.

The smallest auto-invest I run with OWNx is twenty-five dollars a week. No salesperson. No phone call. No minimums in the four or five figures. Just a tiny, repeatable, automated buy that turns into real ounces of metal in an account in my name.

If your gold company will not let you start at twenty-five dollars, ask yourself who that minimum is actually protecting.

Trick #6. The IRA Fee Layer Cake

This one is specifically targeted at retirement money, which is the largest pool of money the gold industry would like to be in.

Here is how the standard precious metals IRA pitch works. The dealer offers to “set up” a self-directed IRA for you, hand-walks you through paperwork, recommends a custodian, recommends a depository, and then, on the way to the actual gold purchase, layers in a series of fees. Setup fees. Annual custodial fees. Annual storage fees. Transaction fees on every buy. Transaction fees on every sell. Sometimes account maintenance fees on top of those.

Add it all up across a year and you can be paying somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of your IRA’s total value just to keep the lights on, before any premium on the metal itself, before any storage cost on the actual ounces. That is on top of the numismatic markup we covered in Trick #1, which is what most of these IRA pitches are pushing you toward.

It does not have to be that way. A precious metals IRA at OWNx runs $249 per year, total, which includes EDGE wholesale pricing on every metal purchase you make inside the IRA. Storage runs 0.5 percent annually. There is no minimum investment, where the big-name competitors are still demanding ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars to open the account. There are no transaction fees on buys or sells. The fee structure fits on one screen because there is not much to it.

The point of a retirement account is to have more money in retirement, not to feed a dealer’s overhead.

Trick #7. The “It Is In Our Vault” Myth

This one is the most subtle and the most important.

You buy gold from a dealer. They tell you they will store it for you in a secure vault. That sounds responsible. It sounds like a good idea. It even sounds like the kind of move a sophisticated investor would make.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. The difference is one word: allocated.

Allocated means specific bars or coins are recorded in your name, segregated, legally separated from the dealer’s own assets, and held in a non-bank depository. If the dealer goes bankrupt tomorrow, your metal is yours. The bankruptcy court cannot touch it. It is not on the dealer’s balance sheet. It is in a vault, in your name, period.

Unallocated means you have a paper claim against a pool of metal that the dealer says they have. You do not own a specific ounce. You own a promise. If the dealer is healthy, the promise is fine. If the dealer fails, you are an unsecured creditor in a line of unsecured creditors, hoping there is enough metal to go around.

A frightening number of retail gold storage programs are unallocated and do not advertise it clearly. The customer thinks they own gold. They actually own a promise that gold exists somewhere on their behalf.

OWNx is allocated, in non-bank depositories in Delaware and Texas, in your name, fully insured, legally separated from OWNx’s own assets. If OWNx ceased operations tomorrow, the metal in your account would still be sitting in those vaults, in your name. That is not a marketing line. It is the legal structure of the account.

And if you ever decide you want to hold a piece of it personally, you can convert and ship it to your house, with insured shipping, at minimums of half an ounce of gold, twenty ounces of silver, or one ounce of platinum. The “I want to hold some of it” instinct is an honest instinct. The platform respects it.

If you are storing gold anywhere, ask the company in writing whether the metal is allocated or unallocated. Their answer tells you everything.

So Why Have I Been a Customer of This One Company for More Than a Decade

I have made the mistake, more than once in my life, of buying something simply because the seller was charming. I have learned to look at the structure instead. The question is never how nice the salesman sounded. The question is how the company makes money, and whether the way it makes money lines up with my interests as a customer or fights against them.

Most retail gold companies make their money on the spread between the price they charge you and the cost of the metal. The bigger that spread, the more profitable the company is. That is a structural conflict of interest. They make more when you pay more.

OWNx makes its money on a small, published premium for non-members and on a flat membership fee for the EDGE program. EDGE members pay no premium at all. They pay an institutional, at-cost price for the actual metal. The company’s revenue does not scale with how much it can squeeze out of any one customer. It scales with how many customers it can keep, for how long, by being honest enough that they stay.

That is not a marketing claim. That is a fee structure. And fee structures, unlike marketing claims, do not lie.

The numbers behind it: founded in 2008, over thirty-two thousand customer accounts, more than three hundred million dollars in customer transactions, A+ rated by the Better Business Bureau, twenty-four-hour live trading since May of 2012, and zero ounces of customer metal lost since founding.

If you want to see the actual setup, the auto-invest mechanism, and the price screen, you can click here.

The Side-By-Side

If it helps to see the seven tricks against the structural alternative, here is the comparison in a single view.

You can see the live cost comparison in more detail here.

What I Actually Do With My Own Money

I am going to keep this short because the answer is boring, and boring is the point.

I have an account with OWNx. I have had one for years. I run an automatic buy every week. The amount is small enough that I do not feel it leaving my checking account, and large enough that, multiplied across the years, it has turned into real ounces of real metal sitting in a vault in my name.

About twelve years ago I had four green toolbox-sized boxes delivered to my office in Arkansas. Each one had to be carried up the stairs one at a time because of the weight. Inside were silver bars and gold coins I had been accumulating, in small amounts, for years before that. The first time I held that weight in my hands, something clicked that no number on a brokerage screen has ever clicked. If you want to take physical delivery at any point, you can do that, and it works the way you would want it to work.

I am not telling you to put your life savings in gold. I think a sane allocation to precious metals is somewhere around 20 percent of investable assets, give or take depending on circumstances. I am telling you that the part you do allocate should not be quietly skimmed by an industry that has built seven tricks into the way it sells.

If You Want to Start

The thing I would do, in your shoes, is the smallest possible version of this.

Open an account. Set up a $25 weekly auto-invest in gold, silver, or a split of both. Watch the metal accumulate for a few months. See the buyback price match the screen. Take a small physical delivery if it would help you trust the structure. Then decide, once you have seen all of it work in real money, whether it makes sense to go larger or to roll a portion of an old IRA over.

None of that requires a phone call. None of it requires a minimum in the four figures. None of it requires you to listen to a celebrity. None of it requires you to take any of the seven tricks at face value.

You can start the entire process here in about five minutes.

I will close with the same thing I open with when somebody asks me for advice on anything financial in person, which is that the world is uncertain, and the right response to that uncertainty is not panic, and it is not denial, and it is certainly not handing your retirement to a salesman with a famous voice. The right response is to put a piece of your money in something that does not depend on anyone else’s promise, and to do it through a structure that is on your side.

For me, for the last decade and counting, that has been OWNx. That is the only gold and silver recommendation I have ever made. If any of this has landed for you, this is where to start.

Disclosure

I am a long-time customer of OWNx and have an affiliate relationship with the company. I am paid a commission when readers open accounts through links in this article. I would not promote the company if I were not also a customer of it, and I have turned down advertising and affiliate offers from every other major gold and silver company in the United States for fifteen years. You should always do your own due diligence before making a financial decision.