Silver forging - does that even exist?
More and more very professional silver counterfeits emerge in the physical precious metal market. Most of the times, nobody expects silver to be forged as it is significantly cheaper compared to gold. But exactly this carelessness is what makes silver so interesting for forgers.
Falsifications in every variation
For the last decades, silver was of no interest because of its “big brother” gold and was sold for low prices. In 2001, one ounce of silver could be purchased for 4 dollars. Ten years later, you already had to pay 40 dollars for an ounce of silver – that is a price increase of 1000%.
This fast rise in value made forging silver interesting for fraudsters. Detailed instructions for forging silver ingots can nowadays be found on the Internet. The range of these imitations includes for example hidden round bars made of foreign material inside the ingots and pre-printed moulds for ingots or coins.
A lot of cheap material comes into question
The most frequent material used for silver forging is copper, lead, molybdenum (because of the similar sound characteristics) and lead-tin alloys. Among these, especially molybdenum and lead-tin alloys turn out to be used more and more because both come very close to the density of silver. This means that falsifications with a core of the mentioned material can be produced in a way that they have the same weight and identical measurements to their original counterpart.
Molybdenum also has sound characteristics corresponding to those of silver or at least very similar ones, so that a common sound test fails. Surface examining methods that don’t pervade the whole objects also fail in such cases. So better trust in methods like the Goldanalytix GoldcreenSensor or the Goldanalytix Bar Texting Kit.
Examples
Known forgery methods are (amongst others):
- Silver ingots filled with lead cores
- Bullion silver coins cast with lead and tin
- Ingots with molybdenum bars
- And many more...
Protect yourself from silver falsifications and test the authenticity of silver – with the Goldanalytix Testing Devices.
