A couple of months ago I decided to divest myself of some of my holdings and convert to something a bit more liquid. I finally decided to buy gold with Bitcoin and set out to find the best vendor to achieve that goal.
A few searches led me back to Bitcointalk.org, where I’d been lurking for quite some time. Agora Commodities popped up as a dealer who was willing to accept payment of Bitcoin for precious metals. With many favorable forum posts praising Agora, I decided to begin the first of several buys with them. I figured that if Joseph and company did well by me, I’d use Agora for the rest of my Bitcoin conversions to gold. My initial order was for seven ounces of gold:
BTC16.01 equating to around $10,000. I placed my first order on the morning of Wednesday, February 19th.
A mixed orderI chose to order a pretty eclectic mix of bullion. Specifically, my seven-ounce order consisted of:
- 5x 1/10 ounce Gold American Eagles
- 2x 1/4 ounce Gold American Eagles
- 2x 1/2 ounce Gold American Eagles
- 5x 1 ounce Gold American Buffalos
This is a tall order to fill, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see if Agora could handle it, regardless of order complexity.
Promises, promisesSo, even though I knew it might take a while to ship, I was fine with waiting a reasonable amount of time for the gold. But I wasn't fine with hearing over and over that the order was "about to ship...," but didn't. Finally, after several delays and promises, I received the gold almost three weeks after placing the order. To be honest, it took a little longer than I expected it to take. But at least I got it.
Fake? Fake.Since we're talking about mail-order bullion here, I thought it wise to have the gold tested for genuineness. Turns out, two of the coins were fake. Yes, fake.
The two 1/2 once American Eagles both failed the Fisch test, which assesses the diameter, the thickness, and the weight of a coin. If a coin is fake, at least one of those dimensions will be incorrect. The coins are the correct
weight, but their thickness and diameters are greater than normal, indicating that at least some of the metal in the coins is a bit less dense than gold. My experts thought they might have tungsten centers, which would explain their larger dimensions.
And Agora dealt with it, right?Wrong. Once we were sure the coins were fake, I contacted Agora through the website to ask how to exchange the two bad coins for the real thing. And the response from Agora? Nothing. Zilch. No response, no acknowledgement, no plan for how I might get replacements.
I'm not sure how to proceed from here. I've got $1400+ in fake bullion no one will take. I might be able to recover some of the gold for its melt value (assuming there
is any gold there), but that's about the only thing I can think to do. I'd welcome suggestions from anyone in the forum, since I don't seem to be getting anything more out of Joseph or Agora Commodities. Anyone have any ideas?