The Gold Courier Scam: How It Works and the One Rule That Stops It

Most of what we talk about on this site is getting a fair price for a family's gold. This guide is about something more serious: not losing everything.

The gold courier scam doesn't shave a few dollars off an offer. It can take a family's life savings in a single afternoon. In this guide I'll show you how it works, step by step, and the one rule that stops it cold. If you have parents or grandparents, please share it with them.

How big the problem is

These numbers come from the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission:

• In 2024, Americans aged 60 and over filed 147,127 complaints with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and reported losing $4.885 billion.
• Reports from older adults who lost $10,000 or more to criminals pretending to be a business or a government agency rose from 1,790 in 2020 to 8,269 in 2024, more than four times as many.
• Gold isn't even one of the payment choices on the FTC's reporting form. Yet in about 21 percent of older adults' 2024 impostor reports with losses over $100,000, people wrote in gold or mentioned it in their story.

In January 2024, the FBI issued a public warning about this scam. Between May and December 2023 alone, it saw losses of more than $55 million from it.

How the scam works

It usually unfolds in four steps.

1. The scare. Someone calls, emails, texts, or puts a pop-up message on your computer. They say they're from tech support, a business or a government agency. Something is terribly wrong, they say, and your accounts are at risk.
2. The "protection." They tell you the only way to keep your savings safe is to turn them into cash, gold or silver. Sometimes they have you buy gold bars or coins from a real dealer and have them shipped to your home.
3. The pickup. They send a courier to your home, or to meet you somewhere public, to collect it "for safekeeping." The courier may even ask for a "passcode," such as the serial number on a dollar bill, to make it feel official.
4. Silence. You're told your money is protected. Then nobody calls back. The gold is gone.

The one rule that stops it

The FBI's warning was plain: the U.S. government and legitimate businesses will never ask you to buy gold or other precious metals. The FTC said the same in July 2025: no one from the government will ever tell you to buy gold bars and hand them over.

Please write a card like this and keep it by the phone:

No real bank, company or government agency will EVER ask me to buy gold, withdraw cash, or hand anything to a courier. Anyone who asks is a criminal.

These callers can sound calm, official and kind. They may already know your name. None of that makes the call real. Two warning signs give them away almost every time: they tell you to keep it secret, even from your family, and they tell you to act today. A real bank will always let you hang up, think it over, and call back on a number you find yourself.

What to do if you get a call like this

1. Hang up. You don't owe politeness to a stranger who is frightening you.
2. Don't click pop-ups or links, and don't call numbers they give you.
3. Call your bank yourself, using the number on the back of your card or on your statement.
4. Call a family member or a trusted friend. Criminals want you alone. Don't be alone with it.
5. Never meet anyone to hand over cash, gold or anything else.
6. Report it, even if you lost nothing: to the FBI at ic3.gov, and to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

If you've already handed something over, report it right away and call your bank. Please don't let embarrassment stop you. As the numbers above show, you are far from alone.

For families, one gentle step helps more than any lecture: agree on a family rule that nobody buys, sells or hands over gold, cash or coins without first calling another family member. It protects the people we love, and the heirlooms they have kept for us, from a stranger's hurry.

Volume III, Sell It Right, covers the scams aimed at older adults in full, including fake coins, traveling buyers and "free appraisals" that come with a sales pitch, and ends with a family selling plan so that any sale happens on your schedule, in the open, with written offers from licensed buyers.