Ruthenium is faked, and gold also has its own counterfeit coins.

Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow

“The real gold fears no fire” has become less reliable starting this year.

CCTV exposed a new method of gold forgery yesterday. A jewelry store in Changxing County, Huzhou, Zhejiang, received a gold necklace last year, with the seller claiming it was made from previously purchased gold. The shop owner checked it through the standard process, visually inspected it with the naked eye, sprayed it with a blowtorch without discoloration, and weighed it, all appearing normal. The gold price was over 800 yuan per gram, and the owner paid happily.

That afternoon, a veteran craftsman in the shop felt something was off. He cut open the necklace to examine the cross-section; the texture was rough and not as smooth or droplet-shaped as pure gold should be.

After reporting to the police, they traced the transaction records through the funds flow and found that the gang’s dealings spanned several provinces, with multiple gold shops being deceived. Eventually, two core members were arrested at a gold processing workshop in Wuhu, Anhui. According to Changxing police, the total involved value exceeded 800k yuan.

In the workshop, there was a high-temperature melting furnace, molds, hammers, and a silvery-white powder.

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

Its density is almost the same as gold, but its melting point is three times higher. You can’t burn it out with fire. You can’t weigh it on a scale. Using a spectrometer, as宋蒋圳, director of the Southern Gold Market Research Center in Guangdong, interviewed by CCTV, explained, rhenium and gold differ in atomic number by only four, and their signals overlap heavily on instruments, causing ordinary gold analyzers to directly mistake rhenium for gold.

The gold industry’s thousands-year-old method of testing gold has been undermined by a metal powder at the same time.

This isn’t just happening in Changxing. According to CCTV reports and police notices from various regions, from 2024 to now, cases of gold adulterated with rhenium have appeared in Xiangtan, Hunan; Hebi, Henan; Quanzhou, Fujian; Shanghai; Chongqing; and Ningbo, Zhejiang. The Quanzhou Gold and Silver Jewelry Association has stated that they have received related complaints from time to time, and the methods are becoming more covert.

Gold now costs over 1,000 yuan per gram, while rhenium powder sells for dozens of yuan per gram on e-commerce platforms. With such a price gap and detection methods that can be bypassed, it’s natural that some are scheming.

After all, anything with a good market price is susceptible to counterfeiting.

Rhenium powder: easy to produce, difficult to verify

Counterfeiting is a business with a much lower threshold than imagined.

A veteran recycling shop owner in Quanzhou told the media that previously, rhenium was added in small granules, which could still be somewhat detected when mixed into jewelry. Now, the powder is ground as fine as flour, and after high-temperature melting with gold, the surface is indistinguishable. He has been deceived more than once.

The raw materials and formulas used for counterfeiting are no longer secrets.

CCTV reporters searched for rhenium powder on e-commerce and second-hand trading platforms, and the product pages openly displayed their offerings. Details directly stated “gold mixed with rhenium,” “overheated spectrum,” “gold weight increase,” and some sellers even listed proportions, such as “mixed 75% gold with 25% rhenium.” When contacted, one seller guaranteed it could fool the tests, with a mixing ratio of 20% to 23%, claiming that most spectral analyzers on the market cannot detect it.

One phrase on the product page caught the author’s attention: “gold magnification.” “Magnification” sounds like some kind of leverage tool.

What is the price of this rhenium powder? Some merchants list high-purity rhenium powder at 29 yuan per gram, while others specifically mark “gold mixing” at 150 yuan per gram. According to suspects in the Changxing case, their procurement cost was about 100 yuan per gram.

Are there technical means to detect it? Yes, but they are far from ordinary jewelry shops.

According to Zhejiang Shaoxing Market Supervision Bureau’s testing experience, high-precision imported spectrometers can distinguish signals of rhenium and gold. Another method is more thorough: melt the jewelry into gold solution and send it to authoritative institutions for testing. However, a practitioner in Shuibei, Shenzhen, told the Beijing News that most of the hundreds of testing agencies there use domestic instruments costing only tens of thousands of yuan, with limited accuracy, and that destructive testing at authoritative labs does not accept individual samples.

Devices capable of detection are unaffordable for ordinary jewelry shops. Conversely, those that can afford such equipment cannot detect the forgery.

For thousands of years, the rule in gold was that it was difficult to produce but easy to verify—fire would give the answer. Rhenium powder reverses this relationship: creating a fake gold piece takes only a few hours, but verifying a real one now requires sending it to a lab and waiting days.

Difficult to verify, easy to produce—this feels somewhat like a reverse of Bitcoin.

High gold prices, busy forgers

A simple calculation shows why so many are risking it.

The current recycling price for gold is about 1,040 yuan per gram. To make a 100-gram fake pure gold necklace with 20% rhenium, you need 80 grams of real gold and 20 grams of rhenium powder. The cost of 80 grams of real gold is 83,200 yuan; 20 grams of rhenium powder, at the suspects’ self-reported purchase price of 100 yuan per gram, is 2,000 yuan. Total cost is 85,200 yuan, and selling it as pure gold yields 104,000 yuan.

One necklace yields a net profit of nearly 20,000 yuan.

This is based on the recycling price. CCTV reported that some gangs target small and medium-sized recycling shops, which have poor equipment and weak defenses, relying mainly on fire and feel during gold collection. The scammers also perform acts to create urgency, such as claiming “it was handed down from elders” or “lost in a game and need money urgently,” to create a sense of urgency and lower the shop owner’s guard.

The case in Hebi, Henan, was carried out this way. According to local police, two people with rhenium-adulterated necklaces visited three recycling shops in one day, netting over 60,000 yuan. The second shop hadn’t reacted yet, but the third shop owner sensed something was wrong and refused to trade. The scammers then left. From entering to leaving, the entire process took less than half an hour.

It’s not just counterfeiters who profit. The price of rhenium powder has also soared this year.

According to Pengpai News citing Wind data, the average daily price of rhenium powder was still 18k yuan per kilogram in June 2025, but by the end of July, it had skyrocketed to 33k yuan.

In one month, it increased by 83%.

Rhenium was originally a high-temperature alloy material used in aircraft engines, a legitimate industrial application. The world’s proven reserves are about 2,400 tons, mainly in Chile, the US, and Russia, with 80% used in aerospace. However, according to analysts cited by Pengpai News, part of this price surge is driven by speculators and forgery demand.

As gold prices rise, the “informal demand” for rhenium also increases, pushing its price higher along with gold.

A metal that should withstand extreme high temperatures in engines is now most profitable when added to gold necklaces to deceive recycling shop owners.

Counterfeits everywhere

We are no strangers to the word “counterfeit.”

Bitcoin’s code is open source; changing a few parameters can create a new chain, which is how Litecoin came about. The cost is almost zero, but at least it has its own name, its own price, and buyers know they are buying a clone coin.

Rhenium gold is also a counterfeit, but it’s a counterfeit of the periodic table.

Gold’s atomic number is 79, rhenium is 75, a difference of four positions, and these four numbers happen to fall into the blind spot of spectrometers. When melted together in proportion, the resulting product claims to be pure gold in all standard tests.

But compared to counterfeit cryptocurrencies, rhenium gold has an added layer of malice.

When you buy Litecoin, you know it’s not Bitcoin; when you use USDT, you know it’s not USD. Buyers of rhenium gold don’t have that chance—instrument readings tell them it’s real, invoices confirm it’s real, and even cutting open the necklace may not reveal the truth.

At least with cryptocurrencies, the counterfeiting is obvious. With rhenium gold, it’s counterfeit and then labeled as genuine.

According to an industry source cited in a Zhihu article, current standards for precious metal jewelry testing do not specify a limit for rhenium content, and law enforcement lacks basis for regulation. Rhenium is a legitimate industrial material, and buying and selling it legally is possible. You cannot ban a metal needed for aerospace engines from circulating in the market.

Gold prices keep rising, rhenium powder keeps selling, and spectrometer blind spots remain.

Many people buy gold for peace of mind. No account needed, no network connection, and after decades at home, it’s still worth something. But this sense of security depends on certainty—certainty that what you hold is genuine.

In the past, a fire was enough. Now, you might have to melt jewelry into gold solution and send it to a lab.

If verifying a piece of gold costs as much as verifying a blockchain transaction, then how much trust is left in the word “physical”? Perhaps everyone saving gold should reconsider the calculation.