1970 silver art
31st December 2010, 05:32 AM
Got some news for you that will prove to be useful to a lot of GSUSers. I have been noticing this for quite a while now but there are some silver art bars that are not 1-oz .999 silver at all. They are either stamped 1.) "1-oz 100 Mills" or 2.) "15 Grains". A vast majority of these silver plated bars are found on ebay but there have been a few of them that have shown up locally in my area and my local dealer became of victim of receiving these from some sort of clearing house that they use to get more silver. I talked to the local dealer and they said that their clearing house does not pay attention at the silver that they get and I thought to myself "WTF". Also these silver-plated bars Look like the size of a real 1-oz .999 silver bar and they weigh 31.1 grams on their scale when they weighed them. My wild guess is that copper is probably the underlying metal for these silver-plated art bars.
I was not a victim of getting one of these silver-plated bars but the local bullion dealer that I usually go to ended up with about 5 or 6 of these types of silver-plated bars when they got in more silver from their clearing house that they use. I did not know that they got screwed until I went to this local dealer and they told me what happened. The news got worse when I looked to see what silver art bars they had in their .999 generic bin and I found two more of these silver plated bars. I felt bad for the my local dealer and they had a bad batch of silver that came in and I do not think that this has happened to them before.
Here is one example of what the these silver-plated bars look like:
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/AROYALMNT15grain2.jpg
This is a typical reverse side of a silver-plated bar that was minted by the American Royal Mint and the themes to look out for are Horoscope sign themes with the above reverse
Here are some more silver-plated bars that look and weigh like 1-oz .999 silver bars:
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/FakeMJleafbar.jpg
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/FakeMapleleafbar.jpg
I got these 3 pictures off the internet since I do not have any of these bars in my silver art bar collection. Most of you probably already known this but the bad news is that some of these fakes are starting to show up locally and just wanted to give the GSUS community a heads up on this situation if you buy silver bars locally. Just be careful and watch what you are getting.
I was not a victim of getting one of these silver-plated bars but the local bullion dealer that I usually go to ended up with about 5 or 6 of these types of silver-plated bars when they got in more silver from their clearing house that they use. I did not know that they got screwed until I went to this local dealer and they told me what happened. The news got worse when I looked to see what silver art bars they had in their .999 generic bin and I found two more of these silver plated bars. I felt bad for the my local dealer and they had a bad batch of silver that came in and I do not think that this has happened to them before.
Here is one example of what the these silver-plated bars look like:
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/AROYALMNT15grain2.jpg
This is a typical reverse side of a silver-plated bar that was minted by the American Royal Mint and the themes to look out for are Horoscope sign themes with the above reverse
Here are some more silver-plated bars that look and weigh like 1-oz .999 silver bars:
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/FakeMJleafbar.jpg
http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx54/COScollect/FakeMapleleafbar.jpg
I got these 3 pictures off the internet since I do not have any of these bars in my silver art bar collection. Most of you probably already known this but the bad news is that some of these fakes are starting to show up locally and just wanted to give the GSUS community a heads up on this situation if you buy silver bars locally. Just be careful and watch what you are getting.