" Metal tons for sale. (Gold)".

This business circles for years all over the world ... I met in Italy, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Uruguay, the US and several other countries ... Brazil, which incidentally is a producer of gold, of course it is not immune !!
It is important to note that such businesses can very rarely happen but really, when true, usually has very different characteristics of the proposals described herein.

I, coincidentally, direct contact with real gold buyers (major operators in the sector, recognized worldwide) who explained to me how the market works and what are the indispensable minimum conditions to close real business purchase / sale of gold. These conditions are not those that normally appear.

In practice someone contacts you saying you have access to a mine or a mining consortium or some other provider source of tens or hundreds of kilograms of gold (a month or even a week), sometimes the proposal involves a single batch several tons (available at the mine or deposited in a bank, especially in Switzerland), and who wants to sell this gold with an X% discount on the official price, which is usually the second floor of the LME (London Metals Exchange - stock Exchange London Metal) or LBMA (London Bullion Market Association). Obviously part of that discount commission will turn to those involved ...
The alleged seller says to end the operation needs a LOI (Letter Of Intent), a purchase agreement signed sale and a letter of credit (Letter of Credit or LC) conditioned to guarantee the payment of the gold once delivered .
Contracts and offers are full of technical terms and abbreviations typical of the gold market (= Bullion Bar, "Good Delivery" = quality brand recognized internationally ... etc.).
Obviously the proponents do not want or have no condition to provide a verifiable and valid evidence of real existence and availability of such gold nor property and productive capacity of the supposed mine where gold was extracted.
For this claim to a number of excellent excuses ranging from professional secrecy to security issues. But they require a contract signed by the buyer claiming that if they do not deliver the gold will have no problem because the credit card simply will not be paid and the contract may be revoked or canceled.

This is "bullshit" ... the main reason for which this personal wants the letter of credit and the contract signed by an internationally renowned buyer is usually to then go out looking for a bank, an institution or any "dizzy "particular that discounts such letter of credit or use it as collateral / guarantee to anticipate some money to scam artists who will tell a lot of history and use the LC as a way to gain credibility ... then they give the cap and who signed the purchase and / or issued the letter of credit (along with his bank) gets the headache of having to explain who took the default because they do not want to pay the stipulated in the contract and because the letter of credit can not be balcony.

For this reason, today, all international buyers serious gold does not issue credit cards in favor of unknown without first thoroughly checked the source and real gold availability and, in many cases, even after checked these aspects, they only pay on delivery of gold at the location and signing a contract confirming the funds, but no letter of credit issued, or even less, advance values.

Just to give an idea of ??actual volumes know that world gold production in 2000 (the average annual never change much from one year to the other) was 2,580 tons, since in Brazil the total production in the same year was 53 tons.
That is to say that it is known that there is in Brazil a consistent extraction of gold by illegal mining and therefore not recorded. It is very difficult to quantify such illegal production which, however, according to estimates of industry professionals, not enough to overcome the official production and is extremely fragmented, both geographically and from the point of view of mining operations, and therefore not manageable on a consolidated basis by any individual or organization.
In any case, even if there were someone with consolidated access (ie by joining various sources) such gold mining, mined illegally and therefore outside the official statistics, this one could not offer the conditions of sale usually proposed (with LOI, contracts and LC etc ..) as they presuppose a legal sale, with contracts, tax payments, cool admission of payment by bank money means (LC is a bank instrument) etc ... something impossible to do with illegal gold , undeclared and without origin.
An interesting data on extraction in illegal mining, comes from the DNPM (National Department of Mineral Production) according to which from 1980 to 2000 about 41 tons of gold (ie an average of 4 tons per year) were taken from the famous mining Sierra Pelada (PA), which employed tens of thousands of prospectors (came to be 80,000).
Another interesting fact, as a reference, are the numbers of the multinational group AngloGold operations. AngloGold is a seriíssima multinational specialized in the exploration and extraction of gold and operates in eight countries. In Brazil they operate 3 large mining complexes comprising 4-5 gold mines. The total production of the group in Brazil is approximately 13-14 tons per year (ie just over one tonne per month). For this they employ a total of approximately 3,000 employees, operating high-tech equipment and multimillionaires investments.
If some unknown say that can provide one or two tons of gold per month (as we have seen happened several times) extracted from any mine in Brazil, remember that mean that he should be responsible for producing 12-24 tons of gold per year, ie from 22.5% to 45% of total national production, which represent transactions involving some thousands of employees and comparable investments at least to the multinational AngloGold !! Judge you if and when this may be true ...

There is also a variant where such operations are actually used within broader money laundering, using the high values ??of the purchase and sale and / or letters of credit contracts, to justify movements of money or to give money dirty. Needless to say, this is even more dangerous!