A gold scam from Wanjala Geofrey

A stranger contacted me on Facebook saying:

"hello richard
am wanjala geofrey from kenya and am contacting you because am looking for buyers of Gold"

I won't bore you with the entire conversation but these are the highlights:

Wanjala Geofrey: if your not a buyer then i offer commission of 3000usd per kg
Me: Explain this to me a bit more?
Wanjala Geofrey: i have gold for sale and am here looking for buyers, if your not a buyer and you intend to get me buyers then your commission will be 3000usd per kg
Me: You sell gold by the kg?
Wanjala Geofrey yah 250kgs
Me: So you can sell quarter of a ton of gold?
Wanjala Geofrey: no if a buyer is serious i start with 10kgs
Me: And how much does a kg of gold cost?
Wanjala Geofrey: in the international market its at 37000usd but i sell a kg at 30,000usd per kg
Me: How do you manage to sell it cheaper?
Wanjala Geofrey: because it get from villagers who mine it in congo so i sell to the international market

Can you smell the BS yet? The most obvious clue is that he's selling gold at nearly 20% below it's actual price, which is indeed about $37 per gram, $37,000 per kilogram.

To confirm what he was saying he sent over a picture of the gold along with today's newspaper:

And then what he claimed were his company registration document and licence to trade in precious metals:

It's not too difficult, if you look really closely, to see that these documents aren't what they claim to be.

It's also not too difficult to find clues that this is actually no more than a scam. To begin with the company name he mentions is on a long list of companies known to be used in such scams. You can also see descriptions of the scam in several places on the Internet (see here, here and here).

The biggest clue is in the document he sent me which described the process for buying this fictitious gold. It contained this rather hilarious section:

"We hereby confirm with full corporate responsibility, under penalty of perjury, that we are the seller for the above referenced Gold, for sale in the international market. The consignment, being offered, is available and pretty much genuine."

I suspect that "pretty much genuine" is the only honest sentence in the document. The gold is certainly not gold. In some cases people have been shipped brass, in other cases just sand. There is no gold here, none at all.

If my good friend Wanjala Geofrey contacts you, feel free to tell him what you think of him.

You can also email him or even send him a text message on +254714082813 or even Skype him on hard.metal4. Please feel free to be rude!