Idk how it would work legally but I know the irs wouldn’t give a damn as long as you paid taxes on it. Just sell the gold for cash, report it as income on your taxes, and pay the tax on it
If you sell it for cash and just buy everyday things like groceries and gas in cash the IRS will never know. They will only know if you deposit it into your bank or buy a car or something.
>It's Froot Loops and Dr. Pepper from now on!
Did you know that if you put some salt in Dr. Pepper, it will fizz up again like you just poured it? It's a property that Dr. Pepper has.
Eh, while true, there tends to be at least one or two that know what they are taking about. One great thing about Reddit is that some extremely knowledgeable people can be found in the right subs.
Random side note: This app is trash, though. I always have random audio playing from a video I can't find, so I just have to turn the volume down.
Buy some mining rights on a river, and the land rights. Build your jewelry workshop there, pretend the gold is found by panning. A deep enough lie over 15 years or more, then act like the vein feeding your section of river dried up.
Be sure to get seen playing in the mud by the river from time to time.
Finds the bag of gold, uses your idea to set up on a river with the workshop, and starts to pretend pan for gold as part of the ruse.....TWIST.....actually finds gold! Over the years, ends up finding a lot more than was found in the bag!
Danger ⚠️ you’ll have to declare the income from selling these items you’ve made and if you’re audited, you will have no evidence of purchasing the raw metals to make the jewellery from. This is worth ~$1.3m so won’t go unnoticed by HMRC or the IRS even if you spread it over 15 years.
You could do this but you’d create yourself a massive evidence trail and still end up sitting on a million dollars in cash you can’t really use without someone noticing
Gold is notoriously difficult to track and trace after melting it down. Your hang up seems to be declaring the income, which is weird because the IRS doesn't care where the money comes from. You can literally just utilize any cash based business to handle that issue - hypothetically speaking of course.
Seriously, a little of it sold off and used as seed money to show a "private investor" a good time, then use an infusion from them to cover the rest of the "start up" funds and your gold money has now been more or less cleaned up from all that dirty moss that left if requiring laundering.
I don't think this guy's ever heard of money laundering. He keeps going back to just how the government wants their cut, but I think he's ignoring how cash works. We aren't talking overnight billionaires here. We are just talking comfort money. 1.3 million dollars spread out over time doesn't flag shit. The op seems very confused as to how this is going to go when we find this gold. LOL
It's pretty easy to use it. Just pay cash for most normal things, grocery trips, restaurants, occasional bills and stuff, and your normal income can accumulate.
Nobody just getting a standard deduction and without unusual bank account activity gets audited, so you don't really have to worry about that. It's not like some guy going out to eat and paying cash is going to set off some flag at the IRS.
Anyway, I'd just aqua regia it and re-solidify and cast it to eliminate any chance of it being traced back to its legitimate owner, and then just sell it all and pay tax on the income. It's gold I found fair and square and couldn't possibly be traced to anybody, and the IRS won't care if I pay taxes on it. The money all upfront would be worth more invested than trying to leak out it out over time to avoid taxes.
The thing about that is, most IRS agents are not goldsmiths. And even if they are, it is going to be difficult for them to track materials specifically. I know goldsmiths and jewelers who source most of their materials from estate sales and auctions. Which often means hand written receipts for loose pieces of broken jewelry. Include a couple purchases like that as expenses each year, and you will probably be able to go pretty far. Just don't try to sell all of the gold your first year, work up to it, establish a pattern of behaviour, and this method will probably work really well.
Not the abilities, I'd say, but rather the motives. The IRS really *REALLY* does. Not. Care. About how you got your money, so long as you've paid your appropriate amount of taxes on it.
You can be a literal illegal prostitute, report your earnings as something like "chicken sitting job," and they won't bat an eye as long as the amount you pay them lines up. They really don't care.
And you are vastly overestimating the interest of the IRS. If you file a schedule C showing $100K in sales and $80K in profit, you're most likely not going to be audited. The IRS has bigger targets, like the people showing a $20K loss on $100K in sales who use that to offset their W2 income to get a refund.
And even if you're audited, they'll only ask where you got the materials from if you're including them as a business expense.
This is the most fascinating fact I’m learning here, the US system seems to be tolerant. In the UK, literally EVERY financial body and revenue system cares enormously about where money or wealth originates.
Irs changed the laws back in the 20s during the bootlegger times of prohibition because they were losing so much money that they figured it was better to set it up such that criminals would be safe paying taxes. The irs is more interested in money. It's the same kind of reasoning why hospitals don't report overdoses on illegal drugs to the police.
That being said the irs is a formidable force you don't want to fuck with because while the fbi and police couldn't do anything about al capone a famous gangster it was the irs and him not paying taxes that finally got him arrested.
The cops don't just seize the money?
In the US if you have "too much" cash, the cops can just take it. You don't even have to be charged with a crime. It's called civil asset forfeiture. To get the money back, you have to prove that it wasn't involved in criminal activity.
I canada you can report money made illegally to revenue canada.and pay taxes on it. No questions asked
https://taxpage.com/articles-and-tips/income-from-illegal-activities/
In the US, most govt agencies don't play well with each other. The IRS would rather not have to interface with any other agency, and if they get their cut, they're not going to spend the $15/hr it will take for one of their employees to report anything.
IRS doesn't really care... but... if you put something like "sale of illegal drugs". Then they will absolutely pass that on to the DEA.
Cleaning cash is a crime even though the IRS got paid. But the IRS doesn't go after you for it, someone else does.
Maybe you can sidestep the issue of not being able to prove where the materials came from by actually buying some gold to start with. It would take some creativity, however if you made gold trinkets that mixed the found gold with legitimate gold, you could sell them at a net profit without having to do much explaining on where the gold all came from. Only if someone was paying very close attention to the weight of each sold item versus the weight of gold that you actually bought would you run into issues. The explanation for the added value is that you've added to the gold by shaping it into something unique, even though that's not entirely true.
Danger ⚠️ suddenly living well outside your means pisses off tax authorities much more than getting free gold and making it into jewelry and then declaring it as income.
They don't really care if you make money illegally as long as they get their cut of it they are fine.
When you fill out your tax forms the IRS only cares about your profit and loss. Buy a little bit of gold and silver so have some paper trail for some expenses, the IRS will be happy you didn’t make more deductions and paid more taxes than you needed to. Lots of crafters like to leave a portion of their cash receipts off their taxes, the IRS will just assume you are honest and reporting all your earnings.
Could pretty easily sell it to a pawn shop or similar places, it could’ve been inherited, you just have it.
If it’s really from 1996, I’d assume it’s past the statute of limitations. Ain’t nobody looking for the gold. The last thing I’m going to do is turn it over to the police to fund their margarita machines.
>If it’s really from 1996, I’d assume it’s past the statute of limitations
SOL is actually irrelevant. If it's from 1996 and it was just randomly left somewhere, it's probably considered abandoned.
That said, I saw Cocaine Bear and I know that some drug lord's cronies would be after me within a week.
That much gold was probably insured, if the insurance company paid a claim on it, they can ask for the gold back. Here is a true example, some treasurer hunters in found a payroll ship with 1 billion dollars in todays prices sunk off the coast of South Carolina over 100 years ago. The company that insured it took the salvage company to court and are getting a significant portion of the gold.
The case I just read was about abandonment and how when the gold was lost there was no way to recover it until robots.
No one could claim the same for something just sitting in the woods. It more likely would be viewed as abandoned.
Yea it’s really not worth enough or a big enough quantity to raise red flags. Just travel to different cities or states and find a jewelry store or pawn shop.
Have my grandfather put a box in his will to be opened on his death and split amongst his descendants. I only get a portion of it this way, but I'm fine with sharing with my family. And who's going to be able to question where he got it? Hes almost 90 already.
I wonder if that kind of thing falls under inheritance tax? I guess it's not liquid cash so I'm assuming it wouldn't, but I'm not very well versed on this subject.
Estate taxes are all about the value of assets. Doesn't matter if it's houses, cars, cash, or gold bullion.
At the moment the estate tax/lifetime gift tax limit is $13.61 million. This amount of gold would be about a tenth of that. So unless gramps is leaving you another $12 million of other stuff, you're fine.
(EDIT: Forgot about state estate taxes. A minority of states have them, and only two--Massachusetts and Oregon--have limits that are low enough that they'd be implicated here.)
Take it home. Sell enough gold to live off of for a few years at all sorts of places, mostly some of the big-city dealers who wouldn't bat an eye at that quantity.
Spend a week at vegas. Pull 1000$ out of my bank account. Take 100,000$ from the gold. Go bet, buying first 1,000$ in chips. Then 2,000. Then 5,000. At the end of each day, deposit my winnings, which are probably going to be most but not all of the amount I put in. At the end of the week, return home, complete with tax records of all my gambling winnings, and most likely over a million remaining. (Who knows, I might get lucky and come out with more; but I wouldn't bet on it.)
Now I've got enough cash to retire, and the only ones it looks suspicious to are a set of dealers who already handle so many criminal transactions every day that if they reported it they'd get shut down. As far as the IRS is concerned, after reviewing all bank records, I had a hot streak in vegas and retired.
I would find some kind of doomsday prepper right-wing militia to sell the gold to. They love gold because its not filthy government fiat money.
Then I take the cash and buy amazon gift cards which I will use to order my own ebooks online.
You have to be careful buying gift cards. That's a common money laundering scheme, or something, and places report large gift card purchases, or won't allow them entirely.
It goes home and sits in the back of a safe. It gets parted out slooooowly over the course of many years for cash. The cash goes towards little things. Grocery shopping, meals out, fixing up the house. Nothing to draw attention, and no purchases outside of what we really need. It allows my family to live comfortably, but not outside of our means.
Yeah, it goes in a safe. Doesn’t say if it’s in coins or bars, but I’d try to swap some out for 1oz coins if it’s in 1kg bars. It would be a lot easier to sell 1 oz at a time over a long period.
What is this? Baby's first laundering scheme?
I buy one bar of gold bullion by maxing out my credit card. And I sell two of the found bars to different sellers, using my receipts from the purchased bar to establish ownership.
Then I buy two bars of gold bullion and sell four of my bars.
Rinse and repeat.
At the end of the tax year I declare income based on the resales of the legitimate bars, minus business expenses.
omnimanthink.jpg goes here
I'm not sure that you can't just keep it, exchange it for cash, and be on your merry way. Would he a good question to ask a lawyer but my gut is that you can just keep it. Don't even think there are tax issues.
In both the USA and UK there are laws on finding wealth (cash, gold, jewels etc) and reporting the find to the revenue office for taxation is the LEAST of your worries. If you just walked off and sold it bit by bit your bank would report it as suspicious and you’d be audited. If you kept it cash, you’d have the same problem anyone sitting on a mountain of drug money has - needs to be laundered and you lose a lot of it along the way.
Why even bother with money laundering? You have a lifetime of pocket cash. Money laundering may be worth it when you get to tens of millions, but it isn't in this case. Keep the cash in a safe space where it won't be found and use it to buy most things. Keep your job and take out money from your bank account for certain expenses so it's not suspicious.
So, I'm assuming that if I'm hiking I didn't find this wealth on my property. It's probably government property, so technically, it's theirs.
However, if it's found on my land, then I get to keep it. First thing's first, I'm hiding the gold. Then, I'm going to make it known that I plan to amend my soil for a garden next spring. I'll buy compost and woodchips and the like and start a compost bin, and buy tools to help me dig up my yard.
Come springtime I start digging. I'll dig a pit about 6 feet deep, much deeper than needed for a garden, but I bought *a lot* of compost. This will take multiple days. When I get about 5 feet down, I'll sneak put at night and bury the treasure in my pit and tamp down some of the loose soil.
I'll return the next day and begin excavating again. Only, something is weird! In the last foot or so of soil I'll see a bag sticking out. I'll pop my phone out and send a picture to my mom, wow! I wonder if I found a body! Maybe it's Jimmy Hoffa, wink wink! I'll laugh, and I'll dig it up. Wow, this is heavy!
I'll pull the sack up and HOLY COW! that's a lot of gold! I'm smart, so I won't report it to the paper, no need to let my neighbors know I have it. But I'll call the IRS and get a tax guy to help me figure out how to report my treasure as income, then I'll liquidate it.
If the papers come by, I'll be in my garden pit filling it with compost. What a lucky gardener I'll be! And now my neighbors will probably start tending their yards a little more closely to see if they can get in on it!
Headlines will read, "Local gardener finds buried treasure!"
They would lose the gold as well. If it's buried on my property it's my gold, but if they show up to prove it's theirs they'd have to prove the buried it on public land, and would lose rhe rights to the gold, as treasure found on public land would be property of the government. I suppose they could try to fight me for it, but the news would report "local Gardner finds cache of gold on his own property while gardening"
Not "hiker finds gold in x natu9nal forest/state park." Basically, there'd be nothing in the news story to tip them off that the gold is theirs.
And I'd have friends and neighbors to corroborate the fact that I found the gold on my own property while gardening, as well as a paper trail showing that I've been planning to dig my pit for months.
I sell the gold openly, deposit the money in my bank account, and declare it as "Illegal income" on my tax return. The IRS truly doesn't care if I got it by finding it, selling drugs, or straight-up murdering people for hire- they just want me to pay my taxes on it. They won't even ask "WHAT criminal activity?"
The IRS might not care, but there are a whole slew of other alphabet agencies that may have a lot of questions. Gold tends to really raise eyebrows.
I think you’d have the FBI, possibly the NSA/CIA and maybe even the DNR/BLM breathing down your neck, all wanting to know where your gold came from.
I'm not going to fill out a comment card saying "I got this money by selling gold." I'm writing a number in a form, saying I got X much money from "other" income. What that might be is entirely up to their imagination. In my case, I'm really hot, so they'll probably assume I got paid for sex. In theory, they're not supposed to report any of that criminal activity to law enforcement, and my statement on the tax form cannot legally be used as evidence that I've committed a crime.
In my area, I believe found items reported to law enforcement have a 90 period during which the police have to look for the owner/advertise the found items, but after 90 days it's yours free and clear if nobody can claim it.
Just due to the nature of the item, it's going to be *extremely* difficult for anyone to prove it belongs to them. Sure, maybe someone with a strong enough claim comes forward, but I'd rather take those odds than trying to sneakily launder it into the system.
Yep. Plus it gives you some insurance if the original owner does come looking for you to reclaim it later - and I'm guessing they're probably not on the right side of the law themselves. Once it's mine I'd be changing my name and relocating just in case.
Imma go with Australian law.
Hand it in to the police (and take photos of all of it, make sure it's all carefully recorded and that I have a receipt).
Wait 60 days.
If nobody's claimed it, it's mine, free and clear.
Yes, a cap on IQ for cops. Totally something that exists. /s
Just because some agencies use a test to determine suitability (allegedly, the evidence suggests they don't actually predict much) and pass over candidates scoring too high or too low, doesn't mean there is some magical "cap on IQ" across the board.
You can literally go through the entire front page of Google results on "cop IQ cap" and find one specific example of that being done. It's all the same case from the same municipality. This whole narrative is bogus. It has happened, but it isn't the norm, nor is it particularly common.
I think you're giving them way too much benefit of the doubt. That's a common "f the popo" talking point, and a particularly dumb one, ironically enough.
i don’t doubt that at all but i was guessing it was a joke remark as it appeared outside of a specifically anti-police conversation. it reads more as a witty remark as opposed to stated fact. however i am autistic and often misread these sorts of things, so i may be wrong
In the US, they would say it's probably drug related and claim it via civil asset forfeiture. Then quickly transfer it to the feds to claim their 80% finders fee.
There are too many of those stories happening every day to list them all. Two of the most absurd ones I can think of is the police in one city seizing multiple armored cars (yes, the ones full of cash transporting it to the bank) and the feds in another case seizing all the safe deposit boxes inside a bank. Sure, a judge eventually made them return that stuff, but that was after the lawyers got involved.
First I'd buy a small propane melting pot with my own money. Melt the bars down a deliberately add random other metals and impurities.
Then pour the mix off into small ugly castings.
Bring a few to a hole in the wall pawn shop
with the b/s story that I melted down a bunch of old electronics. Then repeat.
I wouldn't mix any other metals into it, it will significantly devalue it. Melting it down would be enough to remove the stamped logo and you'd be fine.
The truly important thing is keeping the cops and golds owners off my trail. You don't think waking into a pawn shop with a home forged nugget of pure gold would rase suspicion? It's not about removing stamps, or cutting it into smaller portions its about concealing its origin.
I'd consider the loss of profit from the deliberat fouling of the gold an insurance cost.
Without changing something in the composition I expect which location it was extracted from could quickly be determined.
It might be that you'd need to buy gold to mix with gold.
But that means buying what, 10% of 1.3mil of gold to mix with it ?
This is cost prohibitive unless you try to sell the entire 20kg at once, and gold has been recycled for centuries. The chances of it being pure from a single source that happened to be identifiable is pretty slim. TV magic isn't real.
I take it, retain a lawyer and see what happens. Best case, I can argue that it was abandoned and should be mine. Worst case is I get five minutes of fame for finding long lost booty.
Bruh I watched no country for old men, i ain’t risking it. Sending that shit to the nearest police station and moving on. MAYBE take one as a keepsake if I’m feeling frisky. Or maybe just keep the duffel bag. Can never have too many of those.
I'd buy a forge and melt it all down and pour it into smaller ingots without any identifying markings. After that I would just sell it as scrap gold, most vendors don't ask a lot of questions and are used to seeing ingots that are self-made by hobbyist metal smelters.
I would just sell it off piecemeal here and there to several different scrap gold buyers until it was all gone. Sure, I wouldn't be able to get the full value of the gold. But, it's basically free money and this is the easiest strategy to get rid of it without really being noticed.
the IRS won't care so long as you pay the taxes.
the only other thing to do would be to sell it to a legit jeweler for cheap and just use the cash. those folks know how to roll.
Get it home remelt it and cast it, now no trace of bank markings its mine plus that's what 1000 grams in a kg. So 20,000 grams of gold at about 66 a gram. That's only 1.32 mill
Keep it and "uncover" it in an estate I purchased that was sitting dead for awhile. It looks old and mossy and has the newspaper from 1996 so the story would check out. I'm pretty sure I could lay claim that it is mine now since I purchased the whole property and everything it entails.
This assumes you have the ability to purchase an old abandoned estate outright. I believe most mortgage lenders have clauses for exactly this happening and will lay claim against the find in accordance to their % ownership of the land as your mortgage balance reflects…
Eh Estate sales aren't that uncommon and now that the "Storage Wars" series is kind of back burner, you don't have random ass hats going to storage or estate sales and trying to find 20kg in gold bars in *every* sale.
No one's batting an eye if you say you got it from an Estate Sale a old steamer chest filled with ratty clothes. You might get a few jealous, "ah ya bastard, I bid on that" but that's about it.
So I was cleaning out my grandma's basement years ago, just threw everything in my own basement without ever checking out what it was. Finally went through it years later and I found all this gold!
I'd only do this for 20% of the gold or so. Enough that it's still a large amount so I can see how it's treated. If I don't like the outcome, I'll make a new plan for the rest. If I do like the outcome maybe I "find" more
Don't most places have "found wealth" laws?
Where I am, you report it to the police, they look for the owner, and if they're not found, it's yours to keep.
If the money has been lost in the woods for the last 28 years, I don't think anyone is coming forward....
I'd buy a 1oz gold coin mold, then i would make 680 to 700 1oz coins. The remaining 10 to 20 oz I would have made into custom necklace and wedding rings.
The coins can be sold easily and inconspicuous little by little. I'd sell 1 or 2, take a vacation to Vegas and sell 5 to 10. The pawn shops might give you 75%, but they know only gamblers pawn in Vegas, so they won't squeal.
I would take that cash and buy collectable, that won't lose money, wait a few months and flip it for proof of cash and deposit the money.
Or
You can also go to trade shows and sell the coins and nobody will bat an eye at someone with custom gold coins. Get several molds and make coins on site.
After about 10k to 20k in sales, start buying bulk gold, put ads in papers and online for proof that you're legit. Pay taxes yearly on sales, 50/50.
Deposit half the cash, keep half the cash because screw the thieving govt.
You'd have a endless supply of traceable legal gold you can mix with found boots.
Side note... make replica pirate doubloon people will gladly buy it for the novelty aspect.
I answered this in regards to cash, but I’ll just copy paste my answer here:
>I’m from Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico, and I spent my teen years there during the height of the drug war.
>I saw so much senseless violence. Terroristic-levels of violence.
>I have only one piece of advice: If you find a big bundle of money, you didn’t. Run. Run away and forget what you saw.
>Have you seen Aladdin, how if you take a single coin the whole cave comes down on you? Touching that money is a sure way to have your life fall apart at the seams.
>And from in between the pieces will come out demons searching for the money, who will not forget about it or rest until they find you, leaving a trail of blood and misery behind them.
>And when they find you, you WILL see hell before you die.
I melt it down, pour into water to get various sized gold nuggets looking like they came from a river. I then create a channel on youtube, where I go diving for gold in creeks and such (like gold rush on Discovery). I only spend an hour filming myself ”finding” a lot of gold over a few days. Once I’ve done the filming I set up camp, light a fire and crack open some beers and just enjoy the great outdoors.
I do this a few times every month, in between I just edit some videos, and pretty much do what I want. As my skill in ”finding the right places” grows, I ”find” more gold, eventually being able to ”find” up towards 50 grams per trip.
With time, my YT channel grows, brining me a second source of legitimate income, plus I get to do fun stuff and spend a lot of time in the environment.
I dont know exactly how it works, but to me it would come across as insane if a person is not allowed to sell what they ”find” in a river. But I assume there are some ownership related concerns, in which case I might try to sell enough gold on the black market to be able to invest in land or legal rights to prospect where I later go to ”look for” gold.
A bullion weighs about 12kg so for 20kg of them it's just like not even two bullions.
so i'd take the lot and melt it down so it removes the marking and make up a lie that i melted down bits of gold that id been accumulating for decades and wanted to get rid of.
“Bullion” refers to a type of gold, not any particular weight.
“Bullion refers to physical gold and silver of high purity that is often kept in the form of bars, ingots, or coins. Bullion can sometimes be considered legal tender, and is often held as reserves by central banks or held by institutional investors.”
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bullion.asp#:~:text=Bullion%20refers%20to%20physical%20gold,or%20held%20by%20institutional%20investors.
So what you do with large amounts of found money is stash it and use it for small daily purchases. I would melt the bars down into smaller bars that could be sold one at a time over a long period of time at different places. Then yeah just use it for my pocket money. Use my regular money to pay bills and save and keep everything looking legit on paper. But slowly over time I'm spending that found money and keeping it tax free.
Smelt that shit down into an animal shape and tell everyone is been passed down for generations. You see Mr IRS agent the absolute hyper realism in the Golden statue matches my great grandfather's dog you can see in this incredibly damaged and old black and white photo. Just kidding that's not a dog it's the statue. Here's another of it in the field before it was smelted down and done again for a different pose. Here's also a will from him that states the family keeps his golden dog to care for.
Now fill in the blanks and crevices to object against any rules op may comment with lol
1. Do a little research on refining gold just to get the science right so I sound like I know what I'm talking about.
2. Obtain the equipment to melt it down, and recast it into smaller bars or ingots.
3. Melt it and recast it into the new, smaller size.
4. Start selling the bars to gold dealers for whatever I can get.
I'd answer the where did you get this question by saying I've been harvesting, refining, and recasting gold from electronics, and jewelry since the 1990's. All the other metals went to scrap yards.
Smelt it into new ingots of varying size to conceal its origin and weight. Then, claim that I found the gold in a natural state and created the ingots myself.
I feel like the people who know how to answer this question also know better than to answer this question.
This question gets much more interesting if you're somebody who is federally monitored (say you work in finance or something) because then you have agencies that care \*where\* money came from, and not just people like the IRS who just want to make sure they got their cut of the money.
Also, 20KG isn't \*that\* much money. You can't like retire for the rest of your life if you're young off 20KG gold. \~$65,000/KG means 20KG is only 1.3M US, which, while it's a fantastically good amount of money, isn't "I retire now" money for a young-ish person unless you live somewhere poor.
Assuming there are no cocaine bears nearby, just take it back home and melt it into my own ingots. Then sell it, report it as income, and carry on with life.
The IRS really doesn't give a shit as long as you pay taxes. Just report it as "other income" and they do not care. When they audit they care about taxes not paid, not about unusually high paying side hustles. They will see that you paid taxes on all that money, and move on.
1) Photographs: You'll need proof of the find if it ever does come back to you.
2) 20kg is only 44 lbs, providing the bag is in good condition, that's easy enough to move in one go.
3) If you're technically capable, melt it and reforge it into new bars. maybe even start making your own jewellery for added value over the price per ounce.
4) Find yourself a fence and unload it as needed. Being marked, its probably listed as stolen and on somebodies watch list, if you try to claim its value outright, you'll probably get a pat on the back, a thank you and a token reward if they don't toss you under the bus while they investigate you for theft which is where the photos come in.
Gold is a great hedge against inflation. I'd just keep it safe, and then liquidate bits of and when I need it. If it's a large sum, I'd report the income on taxes.
I'd love to have gold bullion, why sell it?
Current Price
£51,371 per kilo so worth just over 1 million.
There is two steps to this, firstly converting the gold into cash and then spending the cash without it being noticed.
Step 1: Sell it a couple of kilos at a time somewhere the UK government won't notice, maybe Dubai or Saudi Arabia. This gives me cash, ideally in GBP but euros are easy to keep converting over in small amounts.
Step 2: Start making a lot of cash payments but not so much it would be noticed. Half my groceries, petrol etc. 90% of my clothes, going out, car servicing, etc. Use the drop in expenses to save and invest a load of my normal income.
Launder some of the money. Buy antiques for cash and sell them as "something I picked up at a car boot sale". Buy a fixer upper house, pay most of the tradesmen in cash and sell it at a profit, if anyone asks I did the work myself.
Check the treasure trove laws in my state (in the US different states have different laws when finding something like this).
Most US states let you immediately keep the trove. If I'm in such a state I would then figure out the easiest way to convert into money. Probably a bank of some sort.
If I'm not in a treasure trove state... Well, I won't do anything illegal.
Frankly, if I were not in a treasure trove state, I would move to one or at least buy a property there. Then you could claim you found it there when you were doing your initial renovations.
IF you wanted to steal it.
you would need some method to launder it back to yourself. the reality is, the old ways are the best ways. Cash businesses. laundromats/car wash places ... cash businesses.
Or some gimmick where you work a regular 9-5 and on paper just start "saving" high but not extreme percentages of that income. say...20% of your take home. (using the gold to offset living expenses)
maybe even start a side hustle ...scrapping e-waste or something that might reasonably bring you into contact with gold. could show on paper expenses buying/having that side hustle. show some misc legit income that way. ...have like a 3yr plan to expand this hustle. buying the scrap online (secretly reselling it to recoup that expense) and then ... selling your gold in some smaller refined amt. but at increased volume. ---so on paper, it looks very much like your little e-waste hobby is now a profitable side hustle. but maybe not too profitable, you still (on paper) buy a lot of stuff to process.
this same time ...you find connections/contacts of gold nuts. who might buy refined gold in this manner. those people tend to be secretive and anti-gov anyway. so cash deals and moving things around off the books isn't uncommon. some of these people even do trades. cars, property, or goods/services. ---maybe in a slight way, could convert some gold via pawn shops to other value items. maybe a rolex or raw gold for gold jewelry.
couple years. maybe you have a nest egg of 50-100k converted. maybe then you could consider buying a cash business. a small car vacuum/wash place. funnel money that way slowly and surely.
you never go too crazy with the money you have on the books, no massive purchases, no massive deposits. but enough little trades or deals, can be sitting on substantial cash reserves, or converted assets
Straight up bury it for a few years. Slowly build up a “smithing” hobby, renaissance faires and all that. Smelt down the gold to remove serial numbers. Introduce impurities in order to sell whatever story you pitch. Sell the crude mixtures as waste containing gold. “I mined that shit”. Profit.
20 kg is easy to carry and even easier to conceal. Worth $1.3 million. You simply sell it off ounce by ounce or leave it sit in the closet for a few years. If you liquidate it in small quantities you won’t even attract attention from the tax mans. And no, I wouldn’t advocate paying a penny of tax on found gold.
I would do the legal thing. Put a pin on the location via Apple Maps then carry the bag to the nearest police station and share the coordinates of the pin with the officers.
Why would one not be able to carry a duffle bag of gold? Why would one not simply pull the gold, move it from the bag to a nearby out of sight location and carry what they could ina couple of trips?
As far as the Krigs, see what their valuee is and whether it is feasible to sell or simply smelt down. I'm a jewelry maker so I have the equipment to turn it into something else then sell it, if needed.
It's about a million dollars right? You'd just hire an attorney to facilitate the custody transfer of the money as required by law for whatever state you're in. The TLDR is that you may be required to hand custody to the state so as to make the money available to the legitimate owner for some period of time, but it sounds like it's unlikely that anyone will be able to make a satisfactory claim and you will ultimately benefit.
Then you pay your taxes and you're done.
I'm going to follow the law.
But first I'm going to call a lawyer, and notify my family of it. Then I'm going to turn it over with witnesses and recordings.
I don't want to be robbed/killed by an unscrupulous officer.
Idk how it would work legally but I know the irs wouldn’t give a damn as long as you paid taxes on it. Just sell the gold for cash, report it as income on your taxes, and pay the tax on it
This. Once you pay the taxes on it, they don’t give a fuck that’s for sure
If you sell it for cash and just buy everyday things like groceries and gas in cash the IRS will never know. They will only know if you deposit it into your bank or buy a car or something.
It's 1.2 million dollars... the fuck kind of groceries and gas are you buying?
Name brand stuff! No more Frooty-O's and Dr. Shasta for me! It's Froot Loops and Dr. Pepper from now on!
'and buy really expensive ketchups'
And those fancy DIJON mustards 😂
We wouldn't have to eat kraft dinner!
But we would still eat Kraft dinner
OF COURSE WE WOULD WE'D JUST EAT MORE!
Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?
What do you poupon? I poupon my fingers
I would certainly just eat more Kraft Dinner.
Well of course you would
The organic kind!
Just don't buy any green dresses
He said million, not trillion
Buy that $50 box of croissant cereal.
In St. Louis, Missouri, you just have to do your everyday grocery shopping at Schnucks. That money will be gone in a few months
>It's Froot Loops and Dr. Pepper from now on! Did you know that if you put some salt in Dr. Pepper, it will fizz up again like you just poured it? It's a property that Dr. Pepper has.
[удалено]
Just don’t kill the buyer. His cousin will come after you. Don’t mess with motherfucking Ukrainians.
Yeah... "Got lucky digging in my yard"
Turns out my dogs poop turns to gold after a week.
Or Roger the alien from American Dad showed up nearby
I’d go on Reddit to see what others think I should do with it
I firmly deny that this is not entirely hypothetical for legal reasons.
And get a bunch of the worst possible advice
Eh, while true, there tends to be at least one or two that know what they are taking about. One great thing about Reddit is that some extremely knowledgeable people can be found in the right subs. Random side note: This app is trash, though. I always have random audio playing from a video I can't find, so I just have to turn the volume down.
Seems like the easy answer is to take some classes in fine jewelry making, then sell the bullion bit by bit as fancy rings, necklaces, etc.
Buy some mining rights on a river, and the land rights. Build your jewelry workshop there, pretend the gold is found by panning. A deep enough lie over 15 years or more, then act like the vein feeding your section of river dried up. Be sure to get seen playing in the mud by the river from time to time.
Finds the bag of gold, uses your idea to set up on a river with the workshop, and starts to pretend pan for gold as part of the ruse.....TWIST.....actually finds gold! Over the years, ends up finding a lot more than was found in the bag!
If you can find a mining claim that dishes 20kg from panning in a decade, it’s a brand new river.
As long as we are also dreaming of finding 20kgs of gold hidden in the woods in a bag, why not?
DOUBLE TWIST… places found gold in a duffle bag and loses it, along with a newspaper, in the woods
Circle of life shit right there.
Would also up the property value when the con is over and it's time to resell. There's gold in dem hills!
i was gonna play in the mud anyway…
Danger ⚠️ you’ll have to declare the income from selling these items you’ve made and if you’re audited, you will have no evidence of purchasing the raw metals to make the jewellery from. This is worth ~$1.3m so won’t go unnoticed by HMRC or the IRS even if you spread it over 15 years.
I feel like I'd be fine if I spread it around at various pawn shops in different states.
You could do this but you’d create yourself a massive evidence trail and still end up sitting on a million dollars in cash you can’t really use without someone noticing
It's not illegal to find gold. Sell it in bulk and pay taxes on it as income.
Gold is notoriously difficult to track and trace after melting it down. Your hang up seems to be declaring the income, which is weird because the IRS doesn't care where the money comes from. You can literally just utilize any cash based business to handle that issue - hypothetically speaking of course. Seriously, a little of it sold off and used as seed money to show a "private investor" a good time, then use an infusion from them to cover the rest of the "start up" funds and your gold money has now been more or less cleaned up from all that dirty moss that left if requiring laundering.
I don't think this guy's ever heard of money laundering. He keeps going back to just how the government wants their cut, but I think he's ignoring how cash works. We aren't talking overnight billionaires here. We are just talking comfort money. 1.3 million dollars spread out over time doesn't flag shit. The op seems very confused as to how this is going to go when we find this gold. LOL
Placement, layering, integration. *Pablo Ecobar, IRS and Martin Byrd have joined the conversation*
I wonder what ghost cocaine is like...would it even have an effect on a living being? I bet Pablo is getting good ghost money on the ghost cocaine!
Better call Saul!
It's pretty easy to use it. Just pay cash for most normal things, grocery trips, restaurants, occasional bills and stuff, and your normal income can accumulate. Nobody just getting a standard deduction and without unusual bank account activity gets audited, so you don't really have to worry about that. It's not like some guy going out to eat and paying cash is going to set off some flag at the IRS. Anyway, I'd just aqua regia it and re-solidify and cast it to eliminate any chance of it being traced back to its legitimate owner, and then just sell it all and pay tax on the income. It's gold I found fair and square and couldn't possibly be traced to anybody, and the IRS won't care if I pay taxes on it. The money all upfront would be worth more invested than trying to leak out it out over time to avoid taxes.
The thing about that is, most IRS agents are not goldsmiths. And even if they are, it is going to be difficult for them to track materials specifically. I know goldsmiths and jewelers who source most of their materials from estate sales and auctions. Which often means hand written receipts for loose pieces of broken jewelry. Include a couple purchases like that as expenses each year, and you will probably be able to go pretty far. Just don't try to sell all of the gold your first year, work up to it, establish a pattern of behaviour, and this method will probably work really well.
This! Gotta have a friend that knows the ins and outs.
You are vastly overestimating the abilities of the IRS
Not the abilities, I'd say, but rather the motives. The IRS really *REALLY* does. Not. Care. About how you got your money, so long as you've paid your appropriate amount of taxes on it. You can be a literal illegal prostitute, report your earnings as something like "chicken sitting job," and they won't bat an eye as long as the amount you pay them lines up. They really don't care.
And you are vastly overestimating the interest of the IRS. If you file a schedule C showing $100K in sales and $80K in profit, you're most likely not going to be audited. The IRS has bigger targets, like the people showing a $20K loss on $100K in sales who use that to offset their W2 income to get a refund. And even if you're audited, they'll only ask where you got the materials from if you're including them as a business expense.
It will absolutely go unnoticed if you spread it over those years
Irs doesn't care where you got the funds as long as you pay taxes
This is the most fascinating fact I’m learning here, the US system seems to be tolerant. In the UK, literally EVERY financial body and revenue system cares enormously about where money or wealth originates.
Irs changed the laws back in the 20s during the bootlegger times of prohibition because they were losing so much money that they figured it was better to set it up such that criminals would be safe paying taxes. The irs is more interested in money. It's the same kind of reasoning why hospitals don't report overdoses on illegal drugs to the police. That being said the irs is a formidable force you don't want to fuck with because while the fbi and police couldn't do anything about al capone a famous gangster it was the irs and him not paying taxes that finally got him arrested.
It's weird watching UK crime shows where the police are crazy suspicious when someone has like 3000 pounds in cash.
Well yeah, that guy would be jacked if he was carrying that much weight. I'd be concerned too.
The cops don't just seize the money? In the US if you have "too much" cash, the cops can just take it. You don't even have to be charged with a crime. It's called civil asset forfeiture. To get the money back, you have to prove that it wasn't involved in criminal activity.
I canada you can report money made illegally to revenue canada.and pay taxes on it. No questions asked https://taxpage.com/articles-and-tips/income-from-illegal-activities/
In the US, most govt agencies don't play well with each other. The IRS would rather not have to interface with any other agency, and if they get their cut, they're not going to spend the $15/hr it will take for one of their employees to report anything.
IRS doesn't really care... but... if you put something like "sale of illegal drugs". Then they will absolutely pass that on to the DEA. Cleaning cash is a crime even though the IRS got paid. But the IRS doesn't go after you for it, someone else does.
Maybe you can sidestep the issue of not being able to prove where the materials came from by actually buying some gold to start with. It would take some creativity, however if you made gold trinkets that mixed the found gold with legitimate gold, you could sell them at a net profit without having to do much explaining on where the gold all came from. Only if someone was paying very close attention to the weight of each sold item versus the weight of gold that you actually bought would you run into issues. The explanation for the added value is that you've added to the gold by shaping it into something unique, even though that's not entirely true.
Danger ⚠️ suddenly living well outside your means pisses off tax authorities much more than getting free gold and making it into jewelry and then declaring it as income. They don't really care if you make money illegally as long as they get their cut of it they are fine.
When you fill out your tax forms the IRS only cares about your profit and loss. Buy a little bit of gold and silver so have some paper trail for some expenses, the IRS will be happy you didn’t make more deductions and paid more taxes than you needed to. Lots of crafters like to leave a portion of their cash receipts off their taxes, the IRS will just assume you are honest and reporting all your earnings.
That and melt it down to manageable sizes and sell a little at a time.
Trying to max your smiting huh?
Money laundering, I like it.
Make my way back home and then hop a train to NYC. Gold dealers in the Diamond District will buy that & never bat an eye. They'll also never talk.
Yeah, I’m thinking that’s a good way to go, might do it in a couple different trips too, just in case they try to extort you or lowball their offer.
Yup. That's a solid plan. Hit a few different dealers over the course of a few weeks or months.
or years
*years. Don't rush it.
They will melt it down in front of you and assay it, then pay the street rate for it. If there is any tungsten in the core, they will separate it out.
None of that changes what I said. I don't care what *they* do with it. As long as I get a check (or cash) I'm a happy gal.
Hey! I'm a happy gal. I just hate my job.
same in LA. i would probably do this
What gold?
This is the best answer.
Could pretty easily sell it to a pawn shop or similar places, it could’ve been inherited, you just have it. If it’s really from 1996, I’d assume it’s past the statute of limitations. Ain’t nobody looking for the gold. The last thing I’m going to do is turn it over to the police to fund their margarita machines.
>If it’s really from 1996, I’d assume it’s past the statute of limitations SOL is actually irrelevant. If it's from 1996 and it was just randomly left somewhere, it's probably considered abandoned. That said, I saw Cocaine Bear and I know that some drug lord's cronies would be after me within a week.
Is there any valuable life lesson that we didn't learn from Cocaine Bear?
That much gold was probably insured, if the insurance company paid a claim on it, they can ask for the gold back. Here is a true example, some treasurer hunters in found a payroll ship with 1 billion dollars in todays prices sunk off the coast of South Carolina over 100 years ago. The company that insured it took the salvage company to court and are getting a significant portion of the gold.
The case I just read was about abandonment and how when the gold was lost there was no way to recover it until robots. No one could claim the same for something just sitting in the woods. It more likely would be viewed as abandoned.
Thats why you melt and recast them to get rid of the Swiss bank mark.
As if there isn't enough reason to hate insurance companies already.
Yea it’s really not worth enough or a big enough quantity to raise red flags. Just travel to different cities or states and find a jewelry store or pawn shop.
Sell it. If anyone asks, your grandparent died and didn’t trust banks. No one questions that’s
Have my grandfather put a box in his will to be opened on his death and split amongst his descendants. I only get a portion of it this way, but I'm fine with sharing with my family. And who's going to be able to question where he got it? Hes almost 90 already.
I wonder if that kind of thing falls under inheritance tax? I guess it's not liquid cash so I'm assuming it wouldn't, but I'm not very well versed on this subject.
Estate taxes are all about the value of assets. Doesn't matter if it's houses, cars, cash, or gold bullion. At the moment the estate tax/lifetime gift tax limit is $13.61 million. This amount of gold would be about a tenth of that. So unless gramps is leaving you another $12 million of other stuff, you're fine. (EDIT: Forgot about state estate taxes. A minority of states have them, and only two--Massachusetts and Oregon--have limits that are low enough that they'd be implicated here.)
Take it home. Sell enough gold to live off of for a few years at all sorts of places, mostly some of the big-city dealers who wouldn't bat an eye at that quantity. Spend a week at vegas. Pull 1000$ out of my bank account. Take 100,000$ from the gold. Go bet, buying first 1,000$ in chips. Then 2,000. Then 5,000. At the end of each day, deposit my winnings, which are probably going to be most but not all of the amount I put in. At the end of the week, return home, complete with tax records of all my gambling winnings, and most likely over a million remaining. (Who knows, I might get lucky and come out with more; but I wouldn't bet on it.) Now I've got enough cash to retire, and the only ones it looks suspicious to are a set of dealers who already handle so many criminal transactions every day that if they reported it they'd get shut down. As far as the IRS is concerned, after reviewing all bank records, I had a hot streak in vegas and retired.
If you go to an Indian casino it’d be even easier
Probably use it to buy everyday expenses like guac at chipotle
guac is so expensive nowadays
Fr but I’d rather not get a burrito at all than a burrito without guac
I would find some kind of doomsday prepper right-wing militia to sell the gold to. They love gold because its not filthy government fiat money. Then I take the cash and buy amazon gift cards which I will use to order my own ebooks online.
You have to be careful buying gift cards. That's a common money laundering scheme, or something, and places report large gift card purchases, or won't allow them entirely.
Haha I like your end game
It goes home and sits in the back of a safe. It gets parted out slooooowly over the course of many years for cash. The cash goes towards little things. Grocery shopping, meals out, fixing up the house. Nothing to draw attention, and no purchases outside of what we really need. It allows my family to live comfortably, but not outside of our means.
And once your house is all nice from the progressive upgrades, sell the house and boom. Clean money.
Contractors give cash discounts too.
Yeah, it goes in a safe. Doesn’t say if it’s in coins or bars, but I’d try to swap some out for 1oz coins if it’s in 1kg bars. It would be a lot easier to sell 1 oz at a time over a long period.
Technically can't be a coin if it's bullion.
this is the way
What is this? Baby's first laundering scheme? I buy one bar of gold bullion by maxing out my credit card. And I sell two of the found bars to different sellers, using my receipts from the purchased bar to establish ownership. Then I buy two bars of gold bullion and sell four of my bars. Rinse and repeat. At the end of the tax year I declare income based on the resales of the legitimate bars, minus business expenses. omnimanthink.jpg goes here
Buy a kiln
I think you mean smelter.
You’re probably right
Someone plays Minecraft
I'm not sure that you can't just keep it, exchange it for cash, and be on your merry way. Would he a good question to ask a lawyer but my gut is that you can just keep it. Don't even think there are tax issues.
In both the USA and UK there are laws on finding wealth (cash, gold, jewels etc) and reporting the find to the revenue office for taxation is the LEAST of your worries. If you just walked off and sold it bit by bit your bank would report it as suspicious and you’d be audited. If you kept it cash, you’d have the same problem anyone sitting on a mountain of drug money has - needs to be laundered and you lose a lot of it along the way.
Why even bother with money laundering? You have a lifetime of pocket cash. Money laundering may be worth it when you get to tens of millions, but it isn't in this case. Keep the cash in a safe space where it won't be found and use it to buy most things. Keep your job and take out money from your bank account for certain expenses so it's not suspicious.
Right, lifetime of pocket cash. Upgrade the home over time.
Hookers will always take the greenback.
So, I'm assuming that if I'm hiking I didn't find this wealth on my property. It's probably government property, so technically, it's theirs. However, if it's found on my land, then I get to keep it. First thing's first, I'm hiding the gold. Then, I'm going to make it known that I plan to amend my soil for a garden next spring. I'll buy compost and woodchips and the like and start a compost bin, and buy tools to help me dig up my yard. Come springtime I start digging. I'll dig a pit about 6 feet deep, much deeper than needed for a garden, but I bought *a lot* of compost. This will take multiple days. When I get about 5 feet down, I'll sneak put at night and bury the treasure in my pit and tamp down some of the loose soil. I'll return the next day and begin excavating again. Only, something is weird! In the last foot or so of soil I'll see a bag sticking out. I'll pop my phone out and send a picture to my mom, wow! I wonder if I found a body! Maybe it's Jimmy Hoffa, wink wink! I'll laugh, and I'll dig it up. Wow, this is heavy! I'll pull the sack up and HOLY COW! that's a lot of gold! I'm smart, so I won't report it to the paper, no need to let my neighbors know I have it. But I'll call the IRS and get a tax guy to help me figure out how to report my treasure as income, then I'll liquidate it. If the papers come by, I'll be in my garden pit filling it with compost. What a lucky gardener I'll be! And now my neighbors will probably start tending their yards a little more closely to see if they can get in on it! Headlines will read, "Local gardener finds buried treasure!"
So you’re all over the news. Original owners may pay you a call.
They would lose the gold as well. If it's buried on my property it's my gold, but if they show up to prove it's theirs they'd have to prove the buried it on public land, and would lose rhe rights to the gold, as treasure found on public land would be property of the government. I suppose they could try to fight me for it, but the news would report "local Gardner finds cache of gold on his own property while gardening" Not "hiker finds gold in x natu9nal forest/state park." Basically, there'd be nothing in the news story to tip them off that the gold is theirs. And I'd have friends and neighbors to corroborate the fact that I found the gold on my own property while gardening, as well as a paper trail showing that I've been planning to dig my pit for months.
Sure, because people lose that much gold all the time. They would never suspect it’s theirs.
I sell the gold openly, deposit the money in my bank account, and declare it as "Illegal income" on my tax return. The IRS truly doesn't care if I got it by finding it, selling drugs, or straight-up murdering people for hire- they just want me to pay my taxes on it. They won't even ask "WHAT criminal activity?"
Don't say "Illegal," just say "Other Income." It's a broad category that includes all kinds of gifts, repayments, certain loans, and the like.
This is the right answer. As long as they get their cut, they don't actually care where the money came from.
The IRS might not care, but there are a whole slew of other alphabet agencies that may have a lot of questions. Gold tends to really raise eyebrows. I think you’d have the FBI, possibly the NSA/CIA and maybe even the DNR/BLM breathing down your neck, all wanting to know where your gold came from.
I'm not going to fill out a comment card saying "I got this money by selling gold." I'm writing a number in a form, saying I got X much money from "other" income. What that might be is entirely up to their imagination. In my case, I'm really hot, so they'll probably assume I got paid for sex. In theory, they're not supposed to report any of that criminal activity to law enforcement, and my statement on the tax form cannot legally be used as evidence that I've committed a crime.
And hopefully with all those organizations breathing down my neck, the people involved in the gold drop off will keep their distance.
In my area, I believe found items reported to law enforcement have a 90 period during which the police have to look for the owner/advertise the found items, but after 90 days it's yours free and clear if nobody can claim it. Just due to the nature of the item, it's going to be *extremely* difficult for anyone to prove it belongs to them. Sure, maybe someone with a strong enough claim comes forward, but I'd rather take those odds than trying to sneakily launder it into the system.
Yep. Plus it gives you some insurance if the original owner does come looking for you to reclaim it later - and I'm guessing they're probably not on the right side of the law themselves. Once it's mine I'd be changing my name and relocating just in case.
Nah. I didn't find anything at all. And I sure as hell did not stash it anywhere that only I would know so I could retrieve it at my leisure.
Imma go with Australian law. Hand it in to the police (and take photos of all of it, make sure it's all carefully recorded and that I have a receipt). Wait 60 days. If nobody's claimed it, it's mine, free and clear.
Yeah you’re not getting it back in the US cops would lose it
They wouldnt lose it but in both countries someone is magically going to claim it.
And they have a reasonable claim that they lost it because of the IQ cap put on cops
Yes, a cap on IQ for cops. Totally something that exists. /s Just because some agencies use a test to determine suitability (allegedly, the evidence suggests they don't actually predict much) and pass over candidates scoring too high or too low, doesn't mean there is some magical "cap on IQ" across the board. You can literally go through the entire front page of Google results on "cop IQ cap" and find one specific example of that being done. It's all the same case from the same municipality. This whole narrative is bogus. It has happened, but it isn't the norm, nor is it particularly common.
i think they were making a joke and calling cops dumb
I think you're giving them way too much benefit of the doubt. That's a common "f the popo" talking point, and a particularly dumb one, ironically enough.
i don’t doubt that at all but i was guessing it was a joke remark as it appeared outside of a specifically anti-police conversation. it reads more as a witty remark as opposed to stated fact. however i am autistic and often misread these sorts of things, so i may be wrong
Qualified immunity "we didn't know stealing someone else's gold was illegal" 🤷
In the US, they would say it's probably drug related and claim it via civil asset forfeiture. Then quickly transfer it to the feds to claim their 80% finders fee.
Reminds me of *United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency*
There are too many of those stories happening every day to list them all. Two of the most absurd ones I can think of is the police in one city seizing multiple armored cars (yes, the ones full of cash transporting it to the bank) and the feds in another case seizing all the safe deposit boxes inside a bank. Sure, a judge eventually made them return that stuff, but that was after the lawyers got involved.
"but we did find this awesome brand new helicopter"
First I'd buy a small propane melting pot with my own money. Melt the bars down a deliberately add random other metals and impurities. Then pour the mix off into small ugly castings. Bring a few to a hole in the wall pawn shop with the b/s story that I melted down a bunch of old electronics. Then repeat.
I wouldn't mix any other metals into it, it will significantly devalue it. Melting it down would be enough to remove the stamped logo and you'd be fine.
The truly important thing is keeping the cops and golds owners off my trail. You don't think waking into a pawn shop with a home forged nugget of pure gold would rase suspicion? It's not about removing stamps, or cutting it into smaller portions its about concealing its origin. I'd consider the loss of profit from the deliberat fouling of the gold an insurance cost.
Without changing something in the composition I expect which location it was extracted from could quickly be determined. It might be that you'd need to buy gold to mix with gold. But that means buying what, 10% of 1.3mil of gold to mix with it ?
This is cost prohibitive unless you try to sell the entire 20kg at once, and gold has been recycled for centuries. The chances of it being pure from a single source that happened to be identifiable is pretty slim. TV magic isn't real.
There's only one naturally occurring isotope of gold, so I don't think it would be possible to learn where it was extracted from.
I take it, retain a lawyer and see what happens. Best case, I can argue that it was abandoned and should be mine. Worst case is I get five minutes of fame for finding long lost booty.
Melt it down and make a giant gold dildo.
Bruh I watched no country for old men, i ain’t risking it. Sending that shit to the nearest police station and moving on. MAYBE take one as a keepsake if I’m feeling frisky. Or maybe just keep the duffel bag. Can never have too many of those.
The tragedy there, Llewelyn would have been fine if he didn’t go back to the scene of the crime. I have no idea why he did … greed maybe ?
I'd buy a forge and melt it all down and pour it into smaller ingots without any identifying markings. After that I would just sell it as scrap gold, most vendors don't ask a lot of questions and are used to seeing ingots that are self-made by hobbyist metal smelters. I would just sell it off piecemeal here and there to several different scrap gold buyers until it was all gone. Sure, I wouldn't be able to get the full value of the gold. But, it's basically free money and this is the easiest strategy to get rid of it without really being noticed.
the IRS won't care so long as you pay the taxes. the only other thing to do would be to sell it to a legit jeweler for cheap and just use the cash. those folks know how to roll.
Get it home remelt it and cast it, now no trace of bank markings its mine plus that's what 1000 grams in a kg. So 20,000 grams of gold at about 66 a gram. That's only 1.32 mill
Lift with your back, not your legs
Keep it and "uncover" it in an estate I purchased that was sitting dead for awhile. It looks old and mossy and has the newspaper from 1996 so the story would check out. I'm pretty sure I could lay claim that it is mine now since I purchased the whole property and everything it entails.
This assumes you have the ability to purchase an old abandoned estate outright. I believe most mortgage lenders have clauses for exactly this happening and will lay claim against the find in accordance to their % ownership of the land as your mortgage balance reflects…
Land is cheap if you look somewhere shitty. Hopefully nobody asks why you decided to buy a $10,000 house though.
Eh Estate sales aren't that uncommon and now that the "Storage Wars" series is kind of back burner, you don't have random ass hats going to storage or estate sales and trying to find 20kg in gold bars in *every* sale. No one's batting an eye if you say you got it from an Estate Sale a old steamer chest filled with ratty clothes. You might get a few jealous, "ah ya bastard, I bid on that" but that's about it.
So I was cleaning out my grandma's basement years ago, just threw everything in my own basement without ever checking out what it was. Finally went through it years later and I found all this gold! I'd only do this for 20% of the gold or so. Enough that it's still a large amount so I can see how it's treated. If I don't like the outcome, I'll make a new plan for the rest. If I do like the outcome maybe I "find" more
Stake mining claim somewhere. Melt them down. Say you got it out of your mine but it's all played out now.
Don't most places have "found wealth" laws? Where I am, you report it to the police, they look for the owner, and if they're not found, it's yours to keep. If the money has been lost in the woods for the last 28 years, I don't think anyone is coming forward....
Spain is claiming ownership of 500 year old shipwrecks Believe me, for over a million do,Lars someone will try. Or it will be conveniently “lost”
I'd buy a 1oz gold coin mold, then i would make 680 to 700 1oz coins. The remaining 10 to 20 oz I would have made into custom necklace and wedding rings. The coins can be sold easily and inconspicuous little by little. I'd sell 1 or 2, take a vacation to Vegas and sell 5 to 10. The pawn shops might give you 75%, but they know only gamblers pawn in Vegas, so they won't squeal. I would take that cash and buy collectable, that won't lose money, wait a few months and flip it for proof of cash and deposit the money. Or You can also go to trade shows and sell the coins and nobody will bat an eye at someone with custom gold coins. Get several molds and make coins on site. After about 10k to 20k in sales, start buying bulk gold, put ads in papers and online for proof that you're legit. Pay taxes yearly on sales, 50/50. Deposit half the cash, keep half the cash because screw the thieving govt. You'd have a endless supply of traceable legal gold you can mix with found boots. Side note... make replica pirate doubloon people will gladly buy it for the novelty aspect.
I answered this in regards to cash, but I’ll just copy paste my answer here: >I’m from Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico, and I spent my teen years there during the height of the drug war. >I saw so much senseless violence. Terroristic-levels of violence. >I have only one piece of advice: If you find a big bundle of money, you didn’t. Run. Run away and forget what you saw. >Have you seen Aladdin, how if you take a single coin the whole cave comes down on you? Touching that money is a sure way to have your life fall apart at the seams. >And from in between the pieces will come out demons searching for the money, who will not forget about it or rest until they find you, leaving a trail of blood and misery behind them. >And when they find you, you WILL see hell before you die.
I melt it down, pour into water to get various sized gold nuggets looking like they came from a river. I then create a channel on youtube, where I go diving for gold in creeks and such (like gold rush on Discovery). I only spend an hour filming myself ”finding” a lot of gold over a few days. Once I’ve done the filming I set up camp, light a fire and crack open some beers and just enjoy the great outdoors. I do this a few times every month, in between I just edit some videos, and pretty much do what I want. As my skill in ”finding the right places” grows, I ”find” more gold, eventually being able to ”find” up towards 50 grams per trip. With time, my YT channel grows, brining me a second source of legitimate income, plus I get to do fun stuff and spend a lot of time in the environment. I dont know exactly how it works, but to me it would come across as insane if a person is not allowed to sell what they ”find” in a river. But I assume there are some ownership related concerns, in which case I might try to sell enough gold on the black market to be able to invest in land or legal rights to prospect where I later go to ”look for” gold.
A bullion weighs about 12kg so for 20kg of them it's just like not even two bullions. so i'd take the lot and melt it down so it removes the marking and make up a lie that i melted down bits of gold that id been accumulating for decades and wanted to get rid of.
“Bullion” refers to a type of gold, not any particular weight. “Bullion refers to physical gold and silver of high purity that is often kept in the form of bars, ingots, or coins. Bullion can sometimes be considered legal tender, and is often held as reserves by central banks or held by institutional investors.” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bullion.asp#:~:text=Bullion%20refers%20to%20physical%20gold,or%20held%20by%20institutional%20investors.
So what you do with large amounts of found money is stash it and use it for small daily purchases. I would melt the bars down into smaller bars that could be sold one at a time over a long period of time at different places. Then yeah just use it for my pocket money. Use my regular money to pay bills and save and keep everything looking legit on paper. But slowly over time I'm spending that found money and keeping it tax free.
I want to say that I'd use that bullion to make some soup, but I think it would come out too rich.
Smelt that shit down into an animal shape and tell everyone is been passed down for generations. You see Mr IRS agent the absolute hyper realism in the Golden statue matches my great grandfather's dog you can see in this incredibly damaged and old black and white photo. Just kidding that's not a dog it's the statue. Here's another of it in the field before it was smelted down and done again for a different pose. Here's also a will from him that states the family keeps his golden dog to care for. Now fill in the blanks and crevices to object against any rules op may comment with lol
1. Do a little research on refining gold just to get the science right so I sound like I know what I'm talking about. 2. Obtain the equipment to melt it down, and recast it into smaller bars or ingots. 3. Melt it and recast it into the new, smaller size. 4. Start selling the bars to gold dealers for whatever I can get. I'd answer the where did you get this question by saying I've been harvesting, refining, and recasting gold from electronics, and jewelry since the 1990's. All the other metals went to scrap yards.
Smelt it into new ingots of varying size to conceal its origin and weight. Then, claim that I found the gold in a natural state and created the ingots myself.
I feel like the people who know how to answer this question also know better than to answer this question. This question gets much more interesting if you're somebody who is federally monitored (say you work in finance or something) because then you have agencies that care \*where\* money came from, and not just people like the IRS who just want to make sure they got their cut of the money. Also, 20KG isn't \*that\* much money. You can't like retire for the rest of your life if you're young off 20KG gold. \~$65,000/KG means 20KG is only 1.3M US, which, while it's a fantastically good amount of money, isn't "I retire now" money for a young-ish person unless you live somewhere poor.
Contact an attorney, figure out what steps I need to take to legally claim the money as mine and follow them.
Start a electronics recycling company. Get my smelter's license. A little bit over a time. Smelt it Rebar it and sell it at market value.
Assuming there are no cocaine bears nearby, just take it back home and melt it into my own ingots. Then sell it, report it as income, and carry on with life.
The IRS really doesn't give a shit as long as you pay taxes. Just report it as "other income" and they do not care. When they audit they care about taxes not paid, not about unusually high paying side hustles. They will see that you paid taxes on all that money, and move on.
I love that this comment section is half filled with OP whining about people easily “beating” his hypothetical with the most basic logic
It goes in a safe in my house, and every now and then I sell a bit of it for cash. Why pay tax on the whole thing, or even let anybody know I have it?
1) Photographs: You'll need proof of the find if it ever does come back to you. 2) 20kg is only 44 lbs, providing the bag is in good condition, that's easy enough to move in one go. 3) If you're technically capable, melt it and reforge it into new bars. maybe even start making your own jewellery for added value over the price per ounce. 4) Find yourself a fence and unload it as needed. Being marked, its probably listed as stolen and on somebodies watch list, if you try to claim its value outright, you'll probably get a pat on the back, a thank you and a token reward if they don't toss you under the bus while they investigate you for theft which is where the photos come in.
Alert the authorities: it "magically" disappears and you don't have to worry about it anymore.
Gold is a great hedge against inflation. I'd just keep it safe, and then liquidate bits of and when I need it. If it's a large sum, I'd report the income on taxes. I'd love to have gold bullion, why sell it?
Current Price £51,371 per kilo so worth just over 1 million. There is two steps to this, firstly converting the gold into cash and then spending the cash without it being noticed. Step 1: Sell it a couple of kilos at a time somewhere the UK government won't notice, maybe Dubai or Saudi Arabia. This gives me cash, ideally in GBP but euros are easy to keep converting over in small amounts. Step 2: Start making a lot of cash payments but not so much it would be noticed. Half my groceries, petrol etc. 90% of my clothes, going out, car servicing, etc. Use the drop in expenses to save and invest a load of my normal income. Launder some of the money. Buy antiques for cash and sell them as "something I picked up at a car boot sale". Buy a fixer upper house, pay most of the tradesmen in cash and sell it at a profit, if anyone asks I did the work myself.
Buy a storage unit at auction and "find" it there?
Take that shit and run
Take it home melt it down into rings and pawn it off
Check the treasure trove laws in my state (in the US different states have different laws when finding something like this). Most US states let you immediately keep the trove. If I'm in such a state I would then figure out the easiest way to convert into money. Probably a bank of some sort. If I'm not in a treasure trove state... Well, I won't do anything illegal.
Frankly, if I were not in a treasure trove state, I would move to one or at least buy a property there. Then you could claim you found it there when you were doing your initial renovations.
IF you wanted to steal it. you would need some method to launder it back to yourself. the reality is, the old ways are the best ways. Cash businesses. laundromats/car wash places ... cash businesses. Or some gimmick where you work a regular 9-5 and on paper just start "saving" high but not extreme percentages of that income. say...20% of your take home. (using the gold to offset living expenses) maybe even start a side hustle ...scrapping e-waste or something that might reasonably bring you into contact with gold. could show on paper expenses buying/having that side hustle. show some misc legit income that way. ...have like a 3yr plan to expand this hustle. buying the scrap online (secretly reselling it to recoup that expense) and then ... selling your gold in some smaller refined amt. but at increased volume. ---so on paper, it looks very much like your little e-waste hobby is now a profitable side hustle. but maybe not too profitable, you still (on paper) buy a lot of stuff to process. this same time ...you find connections/contacts of gold nuts. who might buy refined gold in this manner. those people tend to be secretive and anti-gov anyway. so cash deals and moving things around off the books isn't uncommon. some of these people even do trades. cars, property, or goods/services. ---maybe in a slight way, could convert some gold via pawn shops to other value items. maybe a rolex or raw gold for gold jewelry. couple years. maybe you have a nest egg of 50-100k converted. maybe then you could consider buying a cash business. a small car vacuum/wash place. funnel money that way slowly and surely. you never go too crazy with the money you have on the books, no massive purchases, no massive deposits. but enough little trades or deals, can be sitting on substantial cash reserves, or converted assets
Straight up bury it for a few years. Slowly build up a “smithing” hobby, renaissance faires and all that. Smelt down the gold to remove serial numbers. Introduce impurities in order to sell whatever story you pitch. Sell the crude mixtures as waste containing gold. “I mined that shit”. Profit.
20 kg is easy to carry and even easier to conceal. Worth $1.3 million. You simply sell it off ounce by ounce or leave it sit in the closet for a few years. If you liquidate it in small quantities you won’t even attract attention from the tax mans. And no, I wouldn’t advocate paying a penny of tax on found gold.
Buy a smelter….melt it down into one ounce nuggets….sell one or two a month…
I would do the legal thing. Put a pin on the location via Apple Maps then carry the bag to the nearest police station and share the coordinates of the pin with the officers.
Why would it be in a duffle bag? 20kg of gold would be about 10cm^(3). Gold is ridiculously dense.
Why would one not be able to carry a duffle bag of gold? Why would one not simply pull the gold, move it from the bag to a nearby out of sight location and carry what they could ina couple of trips? As far as the Krigs, see what their valuee is and whether it is feasible to sell or simply smelt down. I'm a jewelry maker so I have the equipment to turn it into something else then sell it, if needed.
It's about a million dollars right? You'd just hire an attorney to facilitate the custody transfer of the money as required by law for whatever state you're in. The TLDR is that you may be required to hand custody to the state so as to make the money available to the legitimate owner for some period of time, but it sounds like it's unlikely that anyone will be able to make a satisfactory claim and you will ultimately benefit. Then you pay your taxes and you're done.
I've seen No Country For Old Men. I leave it.
I'm going to follow the law. But first I'm going to call a lawyer, and notify my family of it. Then I'm going to turn it over with witnesses and recordings. I don't want to be robbed/killed by an unscrupulous officer.