The problem with gold ingots is, well, you don’t really know what’s in there. Tungsten is close enough to gold in density that gold bars “salted” with tungsten are being found when people try to melt down their gold to make something or split it open to check that its real. Gold and tungsten are both about 19.3 g/cc, so the usual density check doesn’t do the trick, you have to either use a deep-penetrating sensing setup (hazardous radiation and very expensive), or drill or otherwise physically split the bar to check for any tungsten inclusions, requiring re-melting and packaging the gold part. Many of these adulterated gold bars even have the fancy imprinting, serial numbers, and so on from legitimate suppliers so you can’t even judge a bar of gold by its cover.
The point being, if you want to sell a gold bar nowadays, of any substantial size such as those 1kg bars in the article, you can’t just drive up to your local “cash for gold” place and drive away with the ~$60k cash – they’re going to need your name, take the bar for analysis, and in a few days to weeks you may get the cash, or be told your bar was 75% tungsten and get a lot less, if anything. I’m sure there are places which have all the resources to handle the checking on-site in real time, but I noticed when these tungsten bars started showing up in the news the vast majority of the local “cash for gold” places went out of business or changed operations to something else. This makes accepting gold as a bribe somewhat problematic: you can’t just sell it without a paper trail, in case it turns out to be counterfeit, and just sitting on your desk or in a safe it doesn’t do you any more good than a paperweight. It’s just more evidence of your guilt, and an unsalable and unusable albatross lashed to your neck.
