Allt är inte guld som glimmar - guldpläterade tungstentackor!

a German refinery has now discovered that it has received a bogus “gold” bar as well.

The video proof was shown on the German television station ProSieben that ran the news story covering W.C. Heraeus in Hanau, Germany, the world’s largest privately owned refinery.

In the story, Wilfried Horner, head of the gold foundry, shows a 500-gram bar (16.0755 troy ounces) received from an unidentified bank. The bar had the right physical dimensions to be an authentic gold bar, but one of the Heraeus employees suspected something.

After the bar was cut in half, the TV audience could plainly see that the dark insides were tungsten, with only a coating of gold on the outside.

While the story never aired on American TV, it is available on the Internet.

Last fall, Rob Kirby of Kirby Analytics in Toronto reported that China’s central bank had discovered nearly 6,000 400-ounce gold-plated tungsten bars among those it had recently received from bonded warehouses.

It was later learned that at least four counterfeit bars at other locations were found and that all had come from sources within the United States, including Fort Knox, according to the Chinese investigators.

The tungsten slugs came from Eastern Europe - most likely a former strategic stockpile, a remnant of the failed Soviet Empire – which was “acquired” as spoils of Cold War victory during the reign of Bush I circa 1991-92. Between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were actually produced in an Eastern European country [not the U.S. as I originally reported]. These tungsten blanks were shipped to Latin America [Panama] and then air-lifted on to Mena, Arkansas. From Mena, Arkansas, the tungsten blanks were shipped via truck [Brinks and Purolator] – 2 trucks at a time to a refinery in Southern California where they received their gold plating and stamping.