This is one of those things where it’s probably more hassle than it’s worth to keep them. Like, you can’t really do much with the gold on its own, you’d have to sell it, and you can’t exactly just take it to a pawn shop.
Like, you’d have to go to some big time gold dealer and then they’d be like “yah, cool, where the fuck did you get this? Do you have a bill of purchase? Is there a mark on here from who ever minted it? I’m going to have to tell the authorities about this, don’t want to be liable if it turns out you stole this or obtained it illegally”
Sure you could try and find a less than reputable buyer who won’t ask questions, but now you’re risking getting caught up in some organized crime nonsense assuming you can even find one without pre-existing contacts.
Better just to hand it over and be done with the mess. Hope there is some sort of official reward for doing it. Maybe get some money through doing interviews about it.
Melt it and make a bunch of gold rings. Pawn those a few at a time.
Thats what happened to the 50th bar
Those look like at least 10oz bars, so 49x60,000 each is almost 3 million dollars.
Even if lawyers billed half a million, and you got to keep 1/3rd of it, you would still be up a half million.
while digging
See, this is why it’s very important for men, and women, to dig. Wherever you are, home, beach, park, just have a bit of a dig. It’s fun and free!
When I was a little kid, I started digging a hole in my back yard. I only stopped because my dad told me it was compromising the foundation of our house.
At the time, I was convinced I would find triceratops fossils … Not sure where I got that idea.
Pfft, and let the gas company get all the spoils? Even if you don’t find gold down there, you might find precious precious gas!
49 gold bars?!? 39 gold bars is a crazy thing to find digging. I wonder how much you get taxed when you find 29 gold bars. Would you report 19 gold bars? If I found 9 gold bars I think at most I’d be able to part with 1 of the 2 gold bars that I found.
what happened to the one in the top left lol
first one found, hit with shovel
or bit by a very big person trying to see if it was real gold
I definitely would’ve absconded with that shit
I counted, 49 bars in the picture. Hopefully that saves someone else the trouble.
Tap for spoiler
Unless I’m lying…
Hands down would have taken it all and never spoken to anyone about it but the people I sold them to.
I can’t believe someone buried 49 gold bars over here!
Where did they even get 43 gold bars in the first place?
Oh well, I better go turn these 38 gold bars in to the police.Police: o thx for the 13 gold bars!
Police: Hey, chief! Someone just handed in 8 gold bars!
Police chief to the press: The young man turned in 3 gold bars to us, what an example
Press: Nothing to report.
Audience: Honey, they stole 3 gold bars from local pd.
There is absolutely no way I’d have turned those in.
Edit: I found the article, the lad may have a payout coming to him.
It is now held in Brussels as authorities investigate its legal ownership. Belgian law mandates a five-year waiting period for claimants; afterward, the find could be divided between Kobe and the property owner if no owner comes forward and it’s not criminal money.
Hope he gets his due. I cannot fathom the mind that sees Fuck You-money and immediately thinks “oh gosh, I need to give this to a cop!” But I’m sure he meant well.
He wasn’t alone when he found it. It was an entire construction team, building and digging on a municipally owned site which was publicly accessible and almost certainly monitored, if remotely.
There was no conceivable way to keep that find quiet under those circumstances.
So if he did manage to pinch off one, props to him.
Same, but probably difficult to turn $10M in gold into spending money without someone noticing.
Yeah, if I found like a hundred thousand in cash, it wouldn’t get into a bank account, I’d just be buying groceries and retail purchases in cash for a long time, and saving the money I would have spent normally. Maybe asking places to make change so if the serial numbers get noted, things get spread about a bit.
hundred thousand in cash
groceries
In the U.S., that would get you enough food for weeks!
Seriously. Loaded up on groceries this weekend, and total cost for 1.75 carts was well over $600
What the actual fuck is going on over there. My condolences
Just some minor societal collapse. Don’t worry, we’ll totally get better…
just everything being expensive because we pay the monetary price of the colonial wars our oligarch overlords enact abroad to enrich themselves
Imagine doing that 98 times
Don’t forget any home improvement tasks. Need your yard leveled? Landscapers would love to give a slight cash discount.
Tree needs taking down? Cash.
Tuckpointing a chimney? Cash.
Annoyingly, you can’t actually use “cash” cash for a cash down payment on a house. Mortgage lenders like to know where the money is coming from.
That’s why you bury it in the backyard and only use little bits at a time.
But then you risk some kid digging it up and turning it in to the authorities.
The cycle continues
…“and I would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
How would you even go about turning a huge bar of gold into cash anyways?
A single bar? Chip off a 50g piece, re-melt it, sell it to a jeweler or cash-for-gold place. Rinse & repeat with enough time inbetween and never in the same location twice, and always for cash.
Multiple bars will either require a multi year plan or more… professional means.
I think it’s a case of ‘who you know’ in that line of work.
Ebay
10M spend bit by bit takes more than a life time
Should be plenty then.
Definately. More than one needs for survival :D
Best store it where no one will look: in the woodburner. Dont tell anyone.
It’s work, but the hourly rate’s not bad.
He could get it fenced for about 30-50% of its market value.
Exactly, even if he kept 1 bar any place he could legally exchange it will have to give the appropriate tax documents since its such a high amount
I thought gold was soft enough to be easily cut by a lot of other more common metals
True, but you would have to do it so slowly to avoid detection. Small pieces over years maybe decades to avoid detection
Still comes out to a lifechanging amount of money for most people, I would think. Maybe some bars left over for your descendants
Idk. If I lived in a place where healthcare was a right, in which I had reasonable expectations of having my basic needs met, where I felt I didn’t need to scramble day in day out just to survive …
Yeah he should have just brought them to the grocery store and paid with them. Idiot.
I have a friend who used to do exactly this. He used to be a bit of a conspiracy nut and didn’t believe in the stability (or validity, for that matter) of the US dollar. He wanted to do all his monetary exchanges in gold and silver, which were very stable and reliable at the time (about 2 decades ago).
I don’t know how exactly, but he converted any cash he earned into gold and then worked out a deal with his local grocery store to buy his groceries with tiny bits of gold.
He was a good kid, if not a little dumb. I think the grocery store humored him. Besides, gold is valuable, so they may have been just ripping him off.
If he hoarded his gold instead of spent it, he’d be up about 100% over the last five years alone. Only crypto would’ve given that kind of return in the same time span, with far greater risk.
Wow. So if he had gone without food his couple of hundreds of dollars worth of gold would have been worth a couple hundred more dollars right now.
But in terms of use as currency what he was getting ripped off by was whoever was exchanging the gold.
The irony of being called an idiot by someone so dim that “taking the bars to the grocery store” is the best they could come up with. I’m not even offended.
Breathe. Not you.
You said you wouldn’t turn them in. So what would you do with them? How would you even begin to spend them?
I think finding the gold would be a strong motivation to discover a way to launder it. I don’t know how to do it, though.
Long term plan, but…
Begin legitimately prospecting a piece of land legally in Alaska, document that you do so, do some substantial digging/panning etc.
Melt a large bar down into much smaller amounts that are worth only around $500 to $1000 in weight. Sell the melted gold at a local gold precious metals dealer in small batches over the course of many months/years. Claim the profit on your taxes as spoils from your prospecting.
This technique would not work with huge amounts or quantities, and even as I described it, it may bring an audit, since it is likely most prospectors are not that successful.
Except that you’d also have to prove that you know how to refine it to explain why you’re selling pure gold.
That’s not insurmountable to learn, even something like watching Cody’s Labs videos on gold reclamation would be a good starting point.
Overall it would still be tricky to fully pull off without raising suspicion unless the amounts were kept consistently low, at least if you kept it to a 1 person operation.
If you started a gold mining company, hired people to run it legitimately, you could fudge the books on how much was actually mined, sifted, and processed, and that probably wouldn’t get a close inspection.
Maybe he found 100, who knows?
I may have buried them back up and then taken a shit at the location. Then, under the cover of night, returned to retrieve.
Yes, we can confirm the delivery of 45 gold bars at our police department.
Reddit joke second line!
7*7=49
Must have buried a square of them (wink wink)
Must have been San Francisco 49er fan
Why the fuck would you give them to authorities?
Maybe it’s illegal, it’s vastly different from country to country but last time I checked finding treasure on your own property does not mean you own it 100%. Which i think is crazy but yea.
I remember when we could “find” treasure currently owned by other civilizations and throw it on a boat, take it home and just claim it was “found”. Times change I guess.
If some group of US soldiers in Iran find a heap of gold bars, they’re definitely not turning that over to the legal authorities…
We three kings be stealin’ the gold…
Which is pretty fucking stupid because if a mining company finds loot, they’re allowed to go mine it for decades and make billions.
What would you have done? 🙂
Transport it out to international waters. Put it on a boat. Sink the boat. Salvage the boat. Pretty sure its finders keepers if its ship salvage, might have to wait a few years.
Sold it legally if able; sold it illegally if not. I’d prefer travelling all the way to albania one gold bar every summer for the rest of my life (while having it hidden in the meanwhile) than giving it away for free
