I posted on this a million years ago, but one specific instance was a guy was trying to sell gold greek coins that were obviously ancient, claiming they were his grandfather's, but she said he looked like a tweaked meth head. He was trying to argue with her when she said they had to go through appraisals as antiques because he just wanted the gold weight melt value. She eventually got him to agree to talk to her manager and a branch of their company dealt with him. It was only later she realized she could have just handed him $200 or whatever for the coins weight value out of pocket and sold them herself, they could have been worth like 10k. But the important thing is some drug addict got what was coming to him. edit: and also it's less people bringing stolen jewelry, though that does happen and there is no real way to trace it, no pawn holding laws like govern some other business. cash gold businesses have their own parasites; one ring was selling elaborate, and I mean expensively done, fake gold necklaces that passed 3/4 tests buyers were trained on (magnetism, scratch, something else, and they'd fail acid if properly applied). What they were doing is going during busy hours to undertrained rookies and having them do as few of the tests as possible to look legit, then selling a few of these armbands or necklaces which had huge gold weight. Then the refinery would get pissed a week later when they'd get these bad lots, and by then the rings had hit all the gold buyer kiosks and startups in the region and moved on. They did the entire east coast in 2009, for example, before the industry started catching on. edit2: a neckbeard approached her with an offer to buy circuit boards from him for the gold contents. He had a warehouse's worth or so. What made this encounter memorable was he was deluded in thinking the number of boards must be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold (holy of sequence batman), and therefore was already effectively rich from his hoarding he was trying to use that 'soon to be rich beyond your wildest dreams' leverage to make /r/justneckbeardthings look like /r/justdecentfolkthings. Yes, he did have a fedora. he wanted refinery prices he'd looked up on the internet, and when she said no, and he started ranting about how these places were just scammers and he knew what it was really worth etc (he didn't), so she told him to go deal with the refineries directly then. He got huffy and left.