The answer is very simple- you have to buy it as a gold coin in the first place. The odds of you finding a gold coin in a lot of uncleaned ancient coins is astronomical!

I had one of the first uncleaned coin websites on the web, imported uncleaned coins myself for sale, and spent a lot of time looking into this. In all the time I investigated I NEVER EVER found one example of a genuine Gold coin find.

Many of the 鈥淕old Coin Found鈥?feedback turned out to be people being overexcited by overcleaned brass or bronze. Most of those issuing such feedback refused to provide information on their find- Why not let us know what kind of coin they found? Those that said they did not know, what type of coin, but 鈥渒new鈥?it was gold 鈥?we offered to help identify it for them- These offers to help properly ID it were refused. The only conclusion was that a lot of coin dealers use fake feedback from friends, false accounts, etc.

European dealers laughed at the idea of finding gold in their lots of a few thousand coins. They told me that is why they regularly sell some coin dealers lots of low grade, junk silver and gold coins鈥?to salt the sales to fool people.

A small number of people that appeared to genuinely have found gold turned out to have found a thin, near worthless, worn out coin- generally Indian. You can buy these for next to nothing, and it is quote odd that out of hundreds of Roman coins, ONE Indian coin, without the same dirty coating as the rest in the lot, turns up. These were examples of dealers salting their lots to generate more sales and feedback. In a very, very rare case an extremely worn, paper thin, roman gold coin was found, again most probably salted, but it was worn smooth and worthless.

Silver can be found, especially in the fully coated crusty coins, but is uncommon at best. The majority of Silver will be low grade worn common silver coins with about $5 tops that dealers salt their lots with to generate sales and feedback.

With all the information at hand we approached Ebay about stopping these fraudulent auctions. We got no where. Why? Because makes a lot of money off them.

So most decent, honest, fair, noble coin collectors will just REFUSE to buy anything from a dealer that used the gold and silver (!!!!!!) found in their ads. It is deceptive advertising at best, and fraud at worst.