Scrap Gold for Dummies

There are some content farms we don't get to as often as we should, one of which is a site called Wizzley.com. Most of that particular farm's content appears to comprise fake reviews (at least what we've seen of it in the past). but we happened to stumble over a "helpful" piece posted by a repeat DotD who goes by the handle of Mary F. Supposedly Mary's from Oz, but... Whatever the case, we're pretty certain that Mary's take on "Scrap Gold Prices" suffers from a serious deficit of common sense and knowledge.

When you come right down to it, you'd have to be pretty much unconscious not to know at least something about how to sell your scrap gold. After all, when you think about it there are sign-spinners on almost every corner in sections of some towns announcing to all that "We buy gold!" That being said, Mary was apparently trying to help... but some of what she tried to tell her readers was a little off. We're talking such informative stuff as,

"...gold will not cling to the magnet. If there are other metals in the piece, it will cling to the magnet." – Not true, Mary: only iron, nickel, and cobalt are magnetic. "Some gold coins, in fact most, are worth far more than their face value, or weight in gold..." – That's not what "face value" means, Mary. Face value is their value as a coin. For instance, an eagle's face value is a whopping ten bucks. They were worth their weight when the price of gold was fixed, back before 1933. "...you may also be able to extract small amounts of scrap gold from old electronics..." – That takes a lot more effort than most people can handle. "You may be getting 20 percent less than its actual worth, because they have to process the metal..." – Here's an example from today: the price of gold is $1760 per (troy) ounce, and one of the few buyers to advertise their buying price is paying $17.63/gram for 10K gold. You'd need to sell 100g of 10K gold to get $1760, but that would equal 42g of pure gold. That's a discount of about 34%, not "20 percent."

All of that may seem pedantic. Hell, we usually are pedantic. On the other hand, however, the difference between 20% and 34% is pretty significant when the value is $340 compared to $200, for instance.
The claim that a magnets will stick to any gold-plated pieces bespeaks some serious scientific illiteracy: the base metals often used for jewelry include lead, copper, brass, tin, and zinc; none of which is attracted to a magnet. Telling someone that any jewelry that isn't magnetic is "gold" is just dumb. Ditto the notion that face value means "weight" (a Krugerrand excepted). Based on all such mistakes, it's pretty clear that our Dumbass of the Day was nowhere near knowledgeable enough to be an "expert" on scrap gold.

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