New Gold Fraud Technique Using Rhenium Sparks Industry Concern

Author: Curry, Shenchao TechFlow

The saying "True gold fears no fire" hasn't been working as well since this year.

CCTV exposed a new method of gold counterfeiting yesterday. A gold shop in Changxing County, Huzhou, Zhejiang, received a gold necklace last year; the seller claimed it was made from gold previously purchased. The shop owner followed standard procedures: visual inspection showed no issues, the flame test did not change the color, and the weight matched. At a gold price of over 800 yuan per gram, the owner promptly paid.

That afternoon, an experienced master craftsman at the shop sensed something was off. He cut open the necklace to examine the cross-section—the texture was rough, unlike the smooth, droplet-like surface expected of pure gold.

After reporting the incident, the police traced the fund flows and discovered that the gang’s transaction records spanned multiple provinces, with more than one gold shop being defrauded. Eventually, two core members were apprehended at a gold processing workshop in Wuhu, Anhui. According to the Changxing police, the total value of the case exceeded 800,000 yuan.

The workshop contains a high-temperature melting furnace, molds, hammers, and a silvery-white powder.

This powder is rhenium, element number 75 on the periodic table. It has a feature that troubles the entire gold industry:

Its density is nearly identical to gold, but its melting point is three times higher. You can’t burn it with fire, and you can’t detect it with a scale. When tested with a spectrometer, according to Song Jiangzhen, Director of the Guangdong Southern Gold Market Research Center as interviewed by CCTV, rhenium and gold differ by only four atomic numbers, causing their signals to overlap significantly on instruments—standard gold detectors mistakenly identify rhenium as gold.

The gold verification method used by the gold industry for thousands of years was simultaneously undermined by a metallic powder.

This is not an isolated incident in Changxing. According to reports from CCTV and public security announcements from various regions, cases of rhenium-adulterated gold have also occurred since 2024 in Xiangtan, Hunan; Hebi, Henan; Quanzhou, Fujian; Shanghai; Chongqing; and Ningbo, Zhejiang. The Quanzhou Gold and Jewelry Association has reported receiving frequent complaints about such cases, with the methods becoming increasingly covert.

Gold is now over a thousand yuan per gram, while rhenium powder costs just dozens of yuan per gram on e-commerce platforms. With such a price difference and detection being impossible to prevent, it’s only natural that some people start thinking of ways to take advantage.

After all, anything with a good market performance will inevitably be copied.

The business of counterfeiting has a much lower barrier to entry than you might think.

A shop owner in Quanzhou who has been in the recycling business for years told the media that previously, rhenium was added in small granules, which could still be slightly detected when mixed with gold jewelry. Now, rhenium powder is ground as fine as flour and, once melted together with gold at high temperatures, is completely indistinguishable on the surface. He has been deceived by this scheme more than once.

The ingredients and formulas used for counterfeiting are no longer a secret.

A CCTV journalist searched for rhenium powder on e-commerce and second-hand trading platforms, and the product listings were blatantly obvious. The descriptions explicitly stated “gold mixed with rhenium,” “fire-treated and spectrum-processed,” and “gold weight enhancement.” Some sellers even provided ratios, such as “mixed with gold at a 75:25 ratio.” The journalist contacted one of these sellers, who assured them that the mixture could pass as genuine gold—containing 20% to 23% rhenium—and would not be detected by market-available spectrometers.

The wording on the product page, called "Gold Amplification," struck me as interesting—it sounds as if rhenium powder is some kind of leveraged tool.

What’s the price of these rhenium powders? Some sellers list high-purity rhenium powder at 29 yuan per gram, while others specifically label their product as “gold-blended” and sell it at 150 yuan per gram. According to the suspects in the Changxing case, their purchase price was approximately 100 yuan per gram.

Are there technical methods to detect it? Yes, but they are far from what typical jewelry stores use.

According to the testing experience of the Shaoxing Market Supervision Bureau in Zhejiang, high-precision imported spectrometers can distinguish between rhenium and gold signals. Another more thorough method is to melt gold jewelry into molten gold and send it to an authoritative institution for testing. However, a practitioner in Shenzhen’s Shuibei told the Beijing News that most of the hundreds of testing agencies in Shuibei use domestic instruments costing only tens of thousands of yuan, which have limited precision, and authoritative institutions do not accept individual submissions for destructive testing.

Devices that can detect it are too expensive for ordinary jewelry stores. Devices that are affordable can't detect it.

For thousands of years, the rule with gold has been that it’s hard to make but easy to verify—a single flame can provide the answer. Rhenium powder has reversed this relationship: forging a piece of fake gold takes a few hours, but verifying a genuine piece requires sending it to a lab and waiting several days.

Hard to verify, easy to generate, it feels a bit like the reverse of Bitcoin.

Do the math, and you’ll understand why so many people take the risk.

The current buyback price for gold is approximately 1,040 yuan per gram. To make a 100-gram fake gold necklace containing 20% rhenium, 80 grams of real gold and 20 grams of rhenium powder are needed. The cost of 80 grams of real gold is 83,200 yuan; assuming the suspect’s stated purchase price of 100 yuan per gram for rhenium powder, the 20 grams cost 2,000 yuan. The total cost is 85,200 yuan, while selling it as pure gold would fetch 104,000 yuan.

A necklace, netting nearly twenty thousand.

This is still calculated based on the recycling price. According to CCTV, some gangs specifically target small and medium-sized recycling shops, which often have poor equipment and weak security, relying mostly on fire-based methods and intuition to assess gold. Scammers also stage performances, claiming things like “It was passed down by my elderly relatives” or “I lost money in a card game and need cash urgently,” creating a sense of urgency to lower the shop owners’ guard.

The case in Hebi, Henan, was carried out exactly like this. According to local police, two individuals carried necklaces mixed with rhenium and visited three buyback shops in one day, stealing over 60,000 yuan. Before the second shop could react, the third shop owner noticed something suspicious and refused the transaction; the scammers immediately left. The entire process, from entering to leaving, took less than half an hour.

It's not just the fraudsters who are profiting. The price of rhenium powder has also skyrocketed this year.

According to澎湃新闻, citing Wind data, the daily average price of rhenium powder was still 18,000 yuan per kilogram in June 2025, rising to 33,000 yuan by the end of July.

In one month, it increased by 83%.

Rhenium is originally a high-temperature alloy material used in aerospace engines, with legitimate industrial applications. Global proven reserves are only around 2,400 tons, primarily located in Chile, the United States, and Russia, with 80% used in aerospace. However, according to澎湃新闻 citing analyst assessments, part of this price surge is being driven by speculators and fabricated demand.

The higher the gold price, the stronger the informal demand for rhenium, causing rhenium prices to rise accordingly.

A metal originally designed to withstand extreme temperatures in an engine is now most profitably used to be mixed into gold necklaces to deceive scrap shop owners.

We are familiar with the term "altcoin".

Bitcoin's code is open-source; changing a few parameters allows anyone to launch a new chain—Litecoin was created this way. The cost is nearly zero, but at least it has its own name, its own price, and buyers know they're purchasing a altcoin.

Rhenium is also a山寨, except it's山寨ing the periodic table.

Gold has an atomic number of 79, rhenium 75—four positions apart, and these four numbers fall precisely within the blind spot of spectrometers. When rhenium powder is melted with gold in the right proportion, the resulting material passes as pure gold in all standard tests.

But compared to altcoins, Rhenium Gold carries an additional layer of malice.

When you buy Litecoin, you know it’s not Bitcoin; when you hold USDT, you know it’s not the U.S. dollar. Buyers of rhenium gold don’t have this opportunity—the instrument tells them it’s real, the invoice tells them it’s real, and even cutting open the necklace may not reveal the truth.

Altcoins at least openly copy. Rhenium Gold copies and then swaps the label to pass as genuine.

According to an analysis on Zhihu citing industry sources, the current standards for testing precious metal jewelry do not set any upper limit for rhenium contamination, leaving enforcement without basis. Rhenium is a legitimate industrial material, and its trade is legal—you cannot ban a metal essential for jet engines from circulating in the market.

Gold prices are still rising, rhenium powder is still being sold, and the blind spots in the spectrometer remain.

Many people buy gold for the sense of security it brings—no account opening needed, no internet required, and it still holds value decades later when taken out of storage. But this sense of security depends on one thing: you must be certain that what you hold is genuine.

Previously, a single flame was enough; now, you might need to melt your jewelry into gold liquid and send it to a lab.

If verifying a bar of gold were as cumbersome as verifying an on-chain transaction, how much trust would the very notion of “physical” still hold? Perhaps every gold saver should reconsider.