From: Scott Keen
Columbus
I read the full-page advertisement in the Nov. 12 Republic for Federated Mint (not associated with the government), and their “gold vault bricks” being offered at an incredible price in only a few states. The ad is cleverly laid out by the advertiser to look like a legitimate news story.
The ad is full of rhetoric, like you get “four 5-ounce jumbo state bars layered in valuable 24-karat gold bearing the name of the First Bank of America and the state they were once destined for."
This again implies that these items were built by the government for distribution to the states. But that is false. They are made to sell to the public.
What are they made of? The four bars total “20 ounces of high demand bullion copper layered in 24-karat gold." They are gold-plated COPPER BARS. The ad also says “The value of the pure 24-karat gold content is just a bonus…because there is no telling what the actual collector value could be worth.”
Basically, they are saying that the gold layering (plating) is so minimal that it adds no monitory worth to these “bricks." There is no legitimate “collectors market” for these things. They are trinkets.
How much do they cost? In a long, convoluted explanation, they say the bars, for selected states, are “$49 dollars per ounce which totals $980 for the full 20 ounces locked away in these bricks.”
What are you really getting? Copper currently sells for $0.20 (yes, 20 cents) per ounce. So you are getting 20 ounces of copper worth $4. The advertisers already admit that the gold value was not significant. That means a person will pay $980 for $4 worth of copper.
The bricks are falsely labeled “.999 gold." That applies to only the plating. They are marked with a bank name and a state name and come in a cardboard box, so that makes them “collectable," I guess, but that still seems extremely unreasonable.
By the way, pure gold currently sells for $1,888 an ounce. For the price of these 20 ounces of copper, a person could buy a half ounce of pure gold — which would be an infinitely better investment.
Federated Mint recently ran a similar campaign for “state silver bars” they were selling for $99 per ounce, which, at the time, was worth about $17. You can go to the Better Business Bureau website and find out about that.
This ad is so full of misleading statements that I don’t have room to address them, but if you buy these “bricks” and someday try and cash them in, expect to get about $5 out of them.
I am disappointed that newspapers everywhere run these misleading and fatuous ads, as it only lends to their legitimacy.
Caveat Emptor!
Editor’s note: The advertisement referenced in this letter was labeled at the top of the page as an advertisement.
