BroadChain News, April 27, 18:06 — China's state broadcaster CCTV recently exposed a case of gold adulteration, revealing a new fraud method using the metal Rhenium. A gold shop in Changxing County, Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, purchased a gold necklace from a seller last year. Traditional tests such as visual inspection, fire testing, and weighing showed no abnormalities. However, a seasoned craftsman noticed rough cross-section textures after cutting it open, which were not characteristic of pure gold. Police intervened and arrested two core members at a processing workshop in Wuhu, Anhui, with the case involving over 800,000 yuan.
The workshop contained a silvery-white powder—Rhenium, the 75th element on the periodic table. Its density is nearly identical to gold, but its melting point is three times higher, making traditional fire testing and weighing ineffective. Song Jiangzhen, director of the Guangdong Southern Gold Market Research Center, told CCTV that Rhenium is only four elements away from gold on the periodic table, and their spectral signals overlap, causing common testing devices to easily misjudge. Since 2024, similar cases have emerged in Xiangtan, Hunan; Hebi, Henan; Quanzhou, Fujian; Shanghai; Chongqing; and Ningbo, Zhejiang. The Quanzhou Gold and Silver Jewelry Association reported a surge in complaints, with the methods becoming increasingly covert.
Currently, gold prices exceed 1,000 yuan per gram, while Rhenium powder costs only tens of yuan per gram online, creating a huge price gap and detection difficulties. A recycling shop owner in Quanzhou revealed that early adulteration used granular Rhenium, but now fine powder as fine as flour is used, which shows no surface difference when melted into gold. Even the shop owner himself has been deceived multiple times. E-commerce platforms openly sell "Rhenium powder," labeled as "passes fire and spectral tests" and "adds weight to gold." Sellers recommend mixing 20%-23% Rhenium to evade market-grade spectrometers. High-purity Rhenium powder is priced between 29 yuan and 150 yuan per gram, with suspects in the Changxing case stating procurement costs were around 100 yuan per gram.
Tests by the Shaoxing Municipal Market Supervision Administration showed that high-precision imported spectrometers can separate Rhenium and gold signals, but this may require melting and sending samples to authoritative institutions. Ordinary gold shops cannot afford such equipment. Industry insiders point out that Rhenium powder adulteration is no longer an isolated case but a systemic loophole requiring regulatory upgrades and technological innovation in detection.