Beware of Foreign Gold Coins and False Claims

Another favorite scamming technique that coin shops use is claiming that old foreign gold coins are numismatic, non-confiscatible gold.

As a little background, in the middle of 1998, when Y2K fears were running high, Americans were buying a lot of gold coins, fleeing into gold as financial security. Numismatic American gold coins were very hard to get, so most coin shops bought old foreign gold coins, like British Sovereigns, French Francs, German Marcs, Swiss Francs, etc., and made false claims about them. They claimed that these old foreign gold coins, because most of them were minted in the 1800’s or early 1900’s, were numismatic, and consequently, non-confiscatible.

They claimed that because these foreign coins were minted prior to 1934, they would be protected from a possible government confiscation. However, in fact, the protection from confiscation only applies to old (pre-1933) American gold.

In reality, any foreign gold coin regardless of its age or condition is considered bullion in the eyes of our government, and is confiscatible. If the government confiscates gold bullion again, the payback is $50 an ounce for every ounce they take from you.

What these coin companies do is to buy these coins at spot gold or “melt” price, make false claims about them, put huge premiums on them, and peddle them to the naïve public. As an example, before Y2K, a “very good Christian company” was selling a 40-coin survival package of Swedish Koronas and Finish Markkaas. One of the coins was a little under one-tenth ounce, and the other one was a little under one-quarter ounce.

The owner of the coin company stated in the literature that the total ounces of gold in this 40-coin-package was 8.98 ounces. But when I added up the total weight of the 40 coins it came to 7.04 ounces, not 8.98 ounces. So, he lied about the total ounces. The total price of the 40-coin-package was $5,015, or $712.36 per ounce for confiscatible bullion gold. Quite a bargain, and that from a man who quotes Scripture all the time and claims to be a good Christian.