The Korea Customs Service announced Thursday that gold smuggling has risen rather dramatically since 2011, with 99 cases last year worth 9.1 billion won ($7.5 million) in total value.

If you're planning on buying gold bars anytime soon, Winnipeg police are advising extra caution after a series of "suspicious transactions" at locations in the city.

The transactions took place on Nov. 30 at a number of pawn shops and gold buyers, police said, involving the sale or pawning of counterfeit one-ounce gold bars.

Police released footage on Tuesday of what may be the luckiest theft in recent history. In the clip, a man brazenly swipes an 86-pound bucket full of gold worth $1.6 million from the back of an unattended armored truck on West 48th Street in the Diamond District on Sept. 29, in broad daylight, as tourists and locals were walking in and out of the jewelry stores that line the block.

The Perth Mint sent an estimated $1 billion worth of gold to India for refining without the ­apparent consent of its Australian customers, with the West Australian government-owned refiner being dragged into a court case examining the alleged rorting of an Indian excise rebate scheme.

The Weekend Australian can reveal that the Mint arranged for semi-refined gold — or dore — from its mining customers to be sold to a third party for export into India to “test out” an Indian excise scheme. This is despite the Mint having earlier complained to the Indian and Australian governments about the “unfairness” of the excise discount.

An employee of the Royal Canadian Mint allegedly smuggled about $180,000 in gold from the fortress-like facility, possibly evading multiple levels of detection with a time-honoured prison trick.

In these uncertain economic times, you don't have to be a miser to consider putting some of your money into precious metals, and gold and silver coins are an easy way to do that.

But this increased demand for bullion coins — like the American Eagle, South African Krugerrand and Canadian Maple Leaf — has created a golden opportunity for forgers.

Counterfeit coins are "flooding the market at an astonishing rate," and compromising the investments of collectors, according to the American Numismatic Association (ANA).

The news unfortunately just keeps getting worse for customers and creditors of Northwest Territorial Mint. The prominent bullion dealer located near Seattle, Washington filed for bankruptcy court protection at the end of March. The losses of customers who never received delivery of orders plus the losses of other creditors could be as high as $50 million, according to news reports.

Calvert believes the funds received for new orders were used to buy metal needed to deliver orders placed long before. If that's the case, the mint was effectively borrowing money from its hapless customers to finance its business. And this practice may have been going on for as long as a decade. Yet, remarkably, customers continued to do business with the mint even as most other precious metals dealers across America make immediate delivery.

A US financial regulator has slapped two more traders with fines in a widening crackdown on “spoofing,” a form of market trickery.The traders, Heet Khara and Nasim Salim of the United Arab Emirates, were each ordered to pay more than $1.3m in civil penalties to settle charges that they spoofed New York gold and and silver futures markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said.

At least the company is honest and warns you upfront that the gold you "receive" may not be the exact bullion you purchased, in other words this is nothing but the first incarnation of a bullion dealer rehypothecation scheme.