Gold also has “altcoins”: how can rhenium powder invalidate gold testing?
Author: Shenzhao TechFlow
Original title: Rhenium gold is fraudulent; gold also has its own altcoin
The phrase “real money is not afraid of fire” is not easy to use at the beginning of this year.
CCTV revealed a new method of gold fraud yesterday. A gold store in Changxing County, Huzhou, Zhejiang received a gold necklace last year. The seller said it was made with gold he had bought before. The owner tested it according to the procedure. There was no problem with the naked eye inspection. The spray gun did not change color, and the weight on the scale was just right. The price of gold was over 800 grams, and the shopkeeper was quick to pay.
In the afternoon of the same day, a teacher in the store who had been working for many years felt something was wrong. He cut the necklace apart to see the cross section. The texture was rough, not like the smooth droplet-like section that pure gold should have.
After calling the police, following the flow of funds, they discovered that the gang's transaction records were spread all over several provinces, and that more than one gold store had been scammed. Finally, at a gold and gold workshop in Wuhu, Anhui, two core members joined the net. According to the Changxing police, the total value involved in the case was over 800,000 yuan.
The workshop was equipped with a high-temperature melting furnace, molds, hammers, and a silver-white powder.
This powder is calledRhenium, No. 75 of the Periodic Table.It has one characteristic that causes headaches for the entire gold industry:
The density is almost the same as gold, but the melting point is three times that of gold. You burn it, you can't burn it out. You can't measure it on a scale. You measured by spectroscopy. According to Song Jiangzhen, director of the Guangdong Southern Gold Market Research Center, who was interviewed by CCTV, the atomic number difference between rhenium and gold is only 4 positions.The signals on the instrument are highly overlapping, and ordinary gold detectors directly calculate rhenium as gold.
The gold industry has followed the gold inspection method for thousands of years, and it has been destroyed by a type of metal powder at the same time.
This didn't just happen in Changxing. According to CCTV reports and local public security reports, from 2024 to the present, there have been cases of gold adulterated with rhenium in Xiangtan in Hunan, Hebi in Henan, Quanzhou in Fujian, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Ningbo in Zhejiang. The Quanzhou Gold and Silver Jewelry Association claims that it has received related complaints from time to time, and its methods are becoming more and more covert.
Gold is now over 1,000 grams, and rhenium powder costs tens of yuan per gram on e-commerce platforms. The price difference is there, and testing is unstoppable. Naturally, there are people who use their brains.
After all, when the market is good enough, people copy it.
Rhenium powder, easy to produce and difficult to verify
The threshold for falsifying this business is much lower than one might think.
The owner of a recycling shop in Quanzhou, who has been in business for many years, told the media that in the past, small particles were used to mix rhenium, and you can still see some differences when mixed in gold jewelry. Rhenium powder is now ground as fine as flour. After melting with gold at a high temperature, the surface is completely indistinguishable. He himself has been scammed more than once.
The ingredients and recipes used for counterfeiting are no secret.
CCTV reporters searched for rhenium powder on e-commerce and second-hand trading platforms, and the product pages that came up were blatant. The details are directly labeled “gold mixed with rhenium”, “excessive heat over spectrum” and “gold weight gain”. Some sellers even wrote the ratio “75 to 25 mixed with gold.” The reporter contacted one of them, and the other party promised that it would be impossible to detect 20% to 23% with spectroradiometers on the market.
There is a phrase on the product page that I think is very interesting. It's called “gold amplification.” Enlarged it sounds like rhenium powder is some kind of leveraging tool.
What is the price of this rhenium powder? Some merchants sell pure rhenium powder at 29 yuan per gram, while others specifically label “gold blended” for 150 yuan per gram. According to the suspect in the Changxing case, their purchase price was about 100 yuan per gram.
So are there any technical means to detect it? Yes, but it's far from a regular gold store.
According to the testing experience of the Zhejiang Shaoxing Market Supervision Bureau, a high-precision imported spectrometer can separate the signals of rhenium and gold. Another method is more thorough, melting the jewellery into gold water and sending it to an authority for inspection. However, a Shenzhen Shuibei practitioner told the Beijing News that the vast majority of Shuibei's hundreds of testing institutions use tens of thousands of domestically produced instruments. The accuracy is limited, and destructive testing by authorities is not sent to individuals for inspection.
Devices that can be measured can't be bought at ordinary gold stores. Affordable equipment, undetectable.
The rules of gold for thousands of years have been harder to make and easier to test. A single fire can give the answer. Rhenium powder reverses this relationship. After making a piece of fake gold for a few hours, testing a piece of real gold had to be sent to the laboratory for several days.
It's hard to verify, easy to generate, and feels like the opposite of Bitcoin.
The price of gold is high, and fraud is busy
If you do the math, you can see why so many people take risks.
The recycling price of gold is now around 1,040 yuan per gram. To make a 100 gram fake full gold necklace, containing 20% rhenium, you need 80 grams of real gold and 20 grams of rhenium powder. The cost of 80 grams of real gold is 8,200 yuan, and 20 grams of rhenium powder is calculated at the purchase price of 100 yuan per gram, or 2,000 yuan, according to the suspect's own statement. The total cost is 85,200 yuan, and the full price is 104,000 yuan.
One necklace made a net profit of nearly 20,000.
This is still calculated at the recycling price. According to CCTV reports, some gangs specialize in small and medium-sized recycling stores. These stores have poor equipment and poor prevention, and the payment collection process is basically based on fire and feel. The scammer will also cooperate with the performance and make up the phrase “passed down from the elders in the family” or “lost the urgent use of money when playing cards” to create an atmosphere of urgent sales and make the shopkeeper let their guard down.
This is how the case in Hebi, Henan happened. According to local police reports, the two people carried rhenium-adulterated necklaces to run three recycling stores in one day and won more than 60,000 yuan. The second store hasn't responded yet. The third store owner noticed an abnormal refusal to trade, and the scammer turned around and left. From entering the store to leaving, the entire process takes less than half an hour.
It's not just counterfeiters who are profitable. The price of rhenium powder is also skyrocketing this year.
According to Wind data quoted by Pengpai News, the average daily price of rhenium powder was still 18,000 yuan per kilogram in June 2025, and soared to 33,000 yuan by the end of July.
That's an 83% increase in one month.
Rhenium was originally a high-temperature alloy material in aero engines, for serious industrial use. The world has proven reserves of only about 2,400 tons, mainly in Chile, the United States and Russia, 80% of which are used in aerospace. However, according to the judgment of analysts quoted by Surge News, part of this round of price increases is driven by speculators and fraudulent demand.
The higher the price of gold, the stronger the “informal demand” for rhenium, and the price of rhenium rises with the water.
A type of metal that is supposed to withstand extreme heat in engines, but now the most profitable use is to trick recycling store owners by mixing it into gold necklaces.
Cottage is everywhere
We are no stranger to the word “cottage.”
Bitcoin's code is open source, and you can send a new chain by changing a few parameters. This is how Litecoin came about. The cost is almost zero, but at least it has its own name, its own price, and the buyer knows they are buying an altcoin.
Rhenium gold is also a copycat, except that it is the periodic table of elements.
The atomic number of gold is 79, and rhenium is 75. There is a difference of 4 positions. The 4 numbers that came out happened to fall into the blind spot of the spectrometer. Melt rhenium powder and gold in proportion, and what comes out is in front of all routine testsIt claims to be pure gold.
However, compared to altcoins, rhenium gold is a bit more malicious.
When you buy Litecoin, you know it's not Bitcoin, and when you take USDT, you know it's not USD. The buyer of rhenium gold didn't have this opportunity. The instrument told him that it was real, the invoice told him that it was real, and he couldn't even see it when he cut the necklace off.
Altcoins are clearly fraudulent. Rhenium Gold was sold out and the label was replaced with a genuine product.
According to ZhihuOne articleCiting analysis from industry sources, there is no upper limit on the inclusion of rhenium in the current precious metal jewelry testing standards, and there is no basis for enforcement. Rhenium is a serious industrial material, and the trade is legal; you can't ban the circulation of a type of metal needed for aero engines in the market.
The price of gold is still rising, rhenium powder is still being sold, and the spectrometer's blind spot is still there.
Many people buy gold; the idea is to get down to earth. There is no need to open an account, no internet connection, and it's still worth taking it out after decades at home. But this has a basic premise; you have to make sure what you have is real.
Once a fire was enough, now you might have to melt the jewelry into gold water before sending it to the lab.
If verifying the cost of a piece of gold is as troublesome as verifying an on-chain transfer, then how much trust is the word “physical” worth, probably everyone who saves money should recalculate it.
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