Scammers in Norway have persuaded bank customers to buy gold and leave it in forests, where it was stolen, the banking lobby Finans Norge said on Thursday.
The group said the victims had been promised that “others will keep it safe while the value rises”, Bloomberg reported. It did not say how much gold had gone missing.
How the pitch works
Gry Nergård, Finans Norge’s director of anti-fraud operations, told Bloomberg by phone that the first case was registered in the spring. Mining.com, which carried the Bloomberg report, said the cases have been in Oslo, nearby towns and Bergen on the west coast. The scam mostly targets older people.
According to Nergård, it usually starts with a phone call from someone claiming to represent a precious metals retailer. Victims buy the gold. They are then told a courier will collect it.
Later the courier, they are told, cannot come after all. The victim is instructed to leave the gold in a public place instead.
It is a neat piece of misdirection. The forest is the end of a chain, not the start of it. By that point the victim has already spent real money, done what they were asked and been given a plausible reason for the change of plan.
Not every account matches the image of a spade and a map. Vice described the gold as buried. Bloomberg and Finans Norge speak of gold left “in nature” or in public places, and none of the reports we found say how deep anything went.
Why it lands
The absurdity may be part of the appeal. Gold has long been seen as a safe store of value, and many people who distrust banks or markets are drawn to something they can hold. A caller who sounds like a dealer and talks about gold is borrowing that trust.
Norwegian dealers see the same pattern. Ronald Sookael, general manager of Tavex Gull og Sølv, told Bloomberg his firm has dealt with about 20 cases in the past couple of years in which customers were defrauded of gold. He said they are usually people over 60 looking for specific coins, who return to say they handed everything over and have nothing left.
Tavex had not heard of anyone being told to leave gold out in the wild. The forest drop-off appears to be a new twist on an older con.
The pitch also asks little of the victim beyond obedience. There is no complicated product to understand. You buy something tangible, then do one odd but simple thing. If you have already been persuaded that your savings need protecting, a stranger offering to protect them is easy to believe.
That is our reading rather than anything the banks have said. What they do say is that the damage is hard to undo. “There is not much the banks can do” beyond raising awareness, Nergård told Bloomberg. Once a customer has withdrawn money and bought gold, the transaction is no longer a bank transfer that can be flagged or frozen.
A bigger problem
The forest scheme is one of three fraud methods Finans Norge says banks are warning about. According to Newser, summarising the Bloomberg report, the others target employees with access to company bank accounts and offer free gifts from the cosmetics chain Lyko.
The scale of the wider problem is large. Mining.com.au reported that Norwegian banks and their customers lost a combined kr962 million ($146 million) to financial fraud last year. Newser gave a figure of about $100 million, alongside more than $375 million in attempted fraud that lenders stopped. The sources do not explain the difference.
Finans Norge’s advice is plain. “Do not hand over valuables to strangers or leave them in places following instructions from others,” Nergård said in a news release, according to Newser.
Sources: Bloomberg, Mining.com, Newser, Mining.com.au, VICE
This story was compiled by the MDW Newsdesk with AI-assisted tools, using the reporting credited above.
