We all have heard a fools gold and other gold scams that people have fallen for over the years. When it comes to nuggets, the common hoax is to coat a piece of very dense metal with gold and pass that on as the real deal. Once in a while people come out of the woodworks with claims of finding big gold nuggets and being able to sell gold nuggets online. The internet has made it easy for tricksters to successfully full willing buyers into thinking they are buying something genuine despite the fact that they are only going by a picture of said nuggets and the seller’s word. There are hundreds of gold nuggets listed on eBay and people sell gold nuggets and buy gold because they have faith in the legitimacy of eBay.  However, eBay is just an auction platform that cannot guarantee the quality and authenticity of the things that are posted.

The greatest gold nugget hoax took place in April 2010 when a Californian man announced to the world that he had found a 9-pound whopper of a gold nugget somewhere along California’s Mother Lode. Apparently a Reno-based action house handled the sale of the gold to an anonymous buyer in March. The truth is the nugget did not come from anywhere in the U.S., in fact it came from South Eastern Australia in 1987.

 

The man, whose name might be James Saunders Grill, told everybody that he made the discovery at his property, near his hometown of Washington, California. If something was wonky with the sale of a nugget, a couple of people failed to see the “wonkiness” because after all, the nugget was a real nugget. And so Holabird-Kagin bought the nugget and sold it for a little over $400,000. If Murray Cox did not recognise the nugget in a trade magazine as the same one he dug up with his friend Reg Wilson in 1987, no one would have been the wiser. Nuggets are unique, there is never two nuggets that look the same and nugget connoisseurs are hard to fool.

 

Towards the last days of spring, Cox began contacting media companies alerting them to the fraud. A lot of nuggets have come from California Mother Lode. The nugget seemed to be consistent with previous finds made at the California Mother lode, especially around the Blue Lead Mine. As soon as news of the fraud came out Holabird-Kagin refunded the buyer his money and took possession of the nugget again. They have since sold it to another anonymous buyer for an undisclosed amount. No one has filed any criminal charges so Grill or whoever he actually is went scot-free and did not even return whatever money Holabird-Kagin paid for the nugget.

 

 

How Grill got a hold of the nugget to begin with is a mystery. The auctioneer would not say whether he knew how the nugget changed hands from Cox to Grill. Cox himself claims the last time he had the gold nugget in his hand was in 1990 when he sold it to a wanderer called Rattlesnake John from Quartzsite, Arizona who periodically bought consignments of gold and other things that would interest collectors.

 

 

It all turned out to be a hoax. The “Washington Nugget” did not come from California and it had actually been discovered over two decades before in an altogether different continent. Grill not only tried to sell his gold nugget but he tried to have his property assessed hoping that he could sell it for more money if it could be proven that the gold came from his property. However, there has never been any gold found in the town of Washington, California but there have been plenty of gold nuggets found in Australia. In fact, there are large gold nuggets that are being found in Western Australia to this day.