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Gold loans occupy an unusual position in a bank's secured-lending book: the collateral is fungible, easily disguised, and valued by a human being in a matter of minutes. Every other form of collateral in a bank's book – property, vehicles, securities – has a documentary trail that can be independently verified after the fact. A gold ornament, once sealed into a tamper-evident packet, is largely opaque until the loan is closed or the account turns delinquent and the packet is opened for auction. This asymmetry is precisely what spurious-gold fraud exploits: if the purity or the physical presence of the metal is misrepresented at the point of valuation, or substituted afterward while in the bank's custody, the loss is not discovered until years later, at a stage where recovery is close to impossible.