How do I know it's genuine?
We provide an authenticity guarantee for all the products we offer. The gold bars and silver bars we provide come from recognized producers with a Good Delivery Status. This means that the refineries meet the requirements of the London Bullion Market Association and that these bars are minted with at least 99.9% gold or silver.
The coins we offer come from recognized mints, meaning they are legal tender in the country of issue. These are coins minted by state mints, not private ones.
For the pre-owned bullion products, we buy back precious metals from individuals. Often, these are coins and bars from previous years that customers bought from us. Regardless of origin, all these products are tested for weight and purity when we receive them. This testing is done both by weight and by composition. For testing the purity, we use the GVS Bullion Tester, a device with a strong magnet that detects whether the metal reacts to a magnet. Both gold and silver have no magnetic properties and therefore should not react to the magnet.
Many mints respond to individuals' need for assurance about the authenticity of the precious metals offered. For this reason, since 2022, many new coins feature a security emblem. This is the case with Maple Leaf and Britannia coins, for example. The respective mints use special laser technology for this, making it visually easy to confirm the product's authenticity since other parties do not have access to this technology.
Silver and gold coins do not come with a certificate of authenticity because these coins do not have unique serial numbers, making it impractical to link a certificate to a specific coin. However, this is not the case for gold bars. Newly minted gold bars, from Umicore and C. Hafner for instance, come with a certificate of authenticity.
Would you like to test your precious metals yourself? This can be done with several straightforward methods, such as the sound test. The term "paying with sound money" refers to this: market traders recognized the type of metal by the sound of the coin. By dropping a coin on a marble block, one could determine whether it was gold, silver, copper, or a non-precious metal based on the sound it made. If the coin rang when it fell, it was known to be a gold coin.