County Exec Marc Elrich came out on Saturday, August 17th with his latest “Message from the County Executive” video.
In it, the chief exec of Montgomery County updated residents on what was deemed “The Gold Bar Scam” and impacted several people in the Bethesda area:
“The Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office has filed criminal charges against five suspects concerning the well-publicized Gold Bar Scam that affected residents here and across the nation.
The criminal charges brought so far account for nearly $3 million in losses going back to January 2023. Investigators believe the losses still being investigated bring the number of victims close to 20. Many victims have lost their life savings.
In this scam, thieves pressure victims to convert money into gold by insisting they represent the Federal government or that their money is at risk of being stolen by cybercriminals. The sad reality is that victims are on the phone with the people who intend to steal their money.”
I definitely feel for anyone who lost their life savings in this scam. I am sort of stunned that people in our “highly educated” area fell for it, however.
The first tip for anyone presented with this “offer” by someone pretending to be in the Federal government and asking you to convert your wealth into gold (to then be safeguarded by them, the scammer) is to remember this golden rule: your Federal government really isn’t concerned with preserving your hard-earned wealth, and it darn sure doesn’t care much about the steady erosion of the dollar’s purchasing power for average Americans.
Gold was money, is money, will be money for the foreseeable future. It is being revalued, worldwide, as I type this. It just hit an all-time spot-price high (in real terms) of over $2,520 per troy ounce. A troy ounce is over 31.1 grams.
Dollars are debt currency, not real money — every dollar is a debt note of the Federal Reserve Bank. Gold is money — and holding it provides zero counterparty risk to you. But that this the key – you need to hold it and secure it… don’t entrust some shady / fly-by-night third party (government included) to hold the asset for you. That was the biggest mistake these folks made.
The real scam underlying this unfortunate local scam is that people, generations, in MoCo and beyond, have been lied to about gold for years by the “economic experts” and politicians. And our public school education system never attempts to explain sound money to young minds.
Politicians in MoCo and Maryland love the debt dollar. It allows them to continuously hike spending, enrich themselves and cronies, and avoid the truly hard (and politically crushing) choice to raise taxes to pay for their spending. Even with the perpetual currency machine (DC) next door — Maryland politicians spend the tax dollars you pay so fast in Annapolis that they have to hike taxes and fees, year after year! We all know Montgomery County politicians, in present form, cheerlead these tax hiking efforts. This could not occur (at this rate) under a sound-money system.
There is one more scam involving Maryland residents and gold that the mainstream press doesn’t cover: state sales tax (6%) is applied to gold / silver coins, bullion, etc (real money) purchases in Maryland if the total is less then $1,000 for the transaction. Talk about a regressive tax on the working man and woman on smaller purchases of real money.
It is time to end this tax scam as well! More to come.
