Dale Whitaker exposes the "Great Gold Scam," revealing how conservative influencers like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin funnel vulnerable seniors into Augusta Precious Metals and Lear Capital, where markups reach 130% and commissions strip $186,000 from investments. Citing a $76 million indictment against Red Rock Secured and SEC charges against Safeguard Metals for defrauding over 450 elderly victims of $50 million, Whitaker details how networks like Newsmax profit from these traps while partnering with Battalion Metals to offer transparent alternatives. Ultimately, the segment argues that while gold hedges against inflation, this specific predatory model exploits religious fears for massive financial gain. [Automatically generated summary]
It seemed like a good deal buying gold to their viewers.
It was an obvious bet, but it wasn't.
We spent months looking into the gold IRA industrial complex and its relationship with conservative media.
What we found shocked us.
In exchange for huge payouts, some of the most famous names in conservatism have consistently over years directed their viewers to gold companies that exploit them.
In some cases, these companies were outright scams with outrageous terms and shocking margins.
The primary target of all of this is the elderly.
But these companies and their advertising strategies are so effective that people from every walk of life have been lured and have lost millions.
We spoke to the victims of this and we spoke to the insiders.
So I was there about three and a half to four years and the way that I realized that this wasn't as kosher as it seemed in the beginning was there was a gentleman who wanted to sell back 5,000 coins.
So we would sell a client a coin and we would say, hey, our spread is this percent.
29% is what we had at the time.
And then that client at any time in the future could call us and they could sell it back to us at what they had purchased minus the spread and whatever had happened in the markets.
And that isn't really what happens because the companies have the exclusive control over these coins.
They can manipulate the price of the coins at any time.
And so the CEO called me and he asked me very specifically to increase the spread, thereby decreasing the amount of money that we would give to that client who wanted to sell us the coins.
And that's when I realized something was terribly wrong.
Over the past two decades, Americans, mostly conservative Americans seeking protection from market volatility and encouraged by media figures they trust, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into commemorative gold coins.
So the way that it works is a dealer will enter into an exclusive distribution contract with a reputable mint like the Royal Canadian Mint, the British Royal Mint, the Perth Mint.
And what they do is they say, hey, we want you guys to mint this coin for us and we want to have the exclusive distribution capability in the United States.
And the mint says, yes, we'll do this.
This is what it costs.
You pay for the mintage fees.
You pay for the premiums to the mint.
And then they give you the exclusive distribution for that coin in the United States.
Since the value of the coin in theory comes from the value of the gold or silver within it, these coins are technically bullion and they can therefore be used in retirement accounts.
That means effective salesmen can convince people to move their retirement savings into gold-backed IRAs.
Unlike typical gold bars, however, the gold IRA industry coins are exclusive to the companies that sell them.
The companies then massively mark up the price of those coins and tell customers that that price is justified because these are unique collectors' items.
You could argue there's an element of willing buyer and willing seller, but the reality is much different.
But a lot of folks are really relying on the trust that they've built with influencers who push this stuff, that these companies are reputable.
And then when they call the company and you have salesmen purporting themselves to be fiduciaries and telling this person that, hey, this is a better asset for you.
I've been doing this for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.
As a consumer, as an investor, it's like, why would I not listen to my stockbroker?
One of the largest indictments for $76 million was against a company called Red Rock Secured, who the owner, Shea Johnson-Kelly and Jeffrey Ward, they were two of the salesmen at Augusta who left Augusta because they felt they weren't earning enough.
According to federal regulators, Red Rock Secured, quote, used scare tactics to convince prospective customers to transfer funds, including funds from liquidating securities in their tax-deferred retirement accounts in order to purchase precious metals.
In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Red Rock Secured and its executives with fraud.
The government alleged that the company was charging, quote, as much as 130% in markups on the precious metal coins.
They sold to investors.
Through this scheme, defendants allegedly defrauded at least 700 investors out of more than $50 million.
In 2020, 12 states and the CFTC cracked down on metals.com after, quote, defendants allegedly solicited more than $185 million from seniors and other vulnerable investors nationwide by touting precious metals at grossly inflated prices.
In 2023, the SEC filed charges against Safeguard Metals for allegedly, quote, obtaining approximately $67 million from the sale of coins to more than 450, mostly elderly retail investors, and kept approximately $25.5 million in markup on the price it paid to acquire those coins.
The CFTC and SEC are, I think, aware of this problem, but they just don't have the resources at hand to deal with it.
So they end up playing whack-a-mill.
And so they sue Red Rock Secured, but all of the salesmen then start a new company, and then you have a new company, and then that they start down this trajectory and end up doing the exact same things.
Three years after Goldline faced charges, Merritt was accused of engaging in, quote, an aggressive nationwide fraud scheme that has built consumers out of tens of millions of dollars.
After Merit fell, many of the salesmen moved to Augusta Precious Metals, where Whitaker worked.
We reached out to Augusta Precious Metals for comment, and they described Whitaker's claims as, quote, false.
But they acknowledged that the industry is, quote, filled with many bad actors and liars.
The company claimed that Whitaker was terminated due to incompetence and has not had any working relationship with Augusta for nearly 10 years.
Notably, Augusta does not list the prices of their gold coins on their website.
So the target demographic at Augusta Precious Metals was 50 plus conservative Christian.
And the reason for that is because it's typically the conservative Christian who believes in some form of apocalyptic scenario where we're going to get away from the fiat monetary system.
We're going to go back to a barter and trade and they're going to need this gold and silver to barter and trade with.
They're using this angle to target a very specific group of folks to then defraud them of their life savings.
I would consider myself a straight across the board conservative.
I graduated in 1984, joined the Navy.
I was a helicopter pilot in the Navy.
Then after that, I took off the flight suit one day and the very next day I went to work for Motorola and I led their R ⁇ D engineering development projects.
And then after that, I was able to save some money.
So I built up this night's nest egg.
And then, you know, the cloud of COVID hits.
That's how I got into the gold because I'm like, well, I got to get out of the market.
And I think at the time I had about 400,000 left in my 401k.
I got 420 pieces on the first purchase.
I did a second purchase.
There was 59 more.
The story that he told me was these are premium coins.
You know, if I went online, I could see that, you know, 9.999% pure coins were actually selling above what, let's say, a spot price was on the bid and the ask.
So I kind of believe them when they said that these are limited supply.
So that makes them more valuable.
And over time, they're going to appreciate at an increased rate, let's say, as measured to the spot price as a benchmark, which turned out to be 100% false.
If I paid $1,020 premium, and so when I call to say, hey, I'm looking at divesting some of it because I want to move those assets into maybe something different, he's basically quoting me the melt price.
The account manager basically told me there's an inversion in the market where the price of the commodity is going up, you know, on a slope like this.
But because so many retired people are cashing in now, the coin itself, there's no value in it.
The premium on them is basically a sunk cost.
You're throwing that money away.
And then, you know, once I find out, you know, how the pricing model worked, and then what they told me was just did not come true based on, you know, they just totally misled me.
Being a conservative and watching, you know, conservative shows, things like that, they were pumping this company and I trusted them.
And people need to know, you know, it's not just to do your own research.
As Americans rushed to turn their dollars into gold during the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt, as one of his first acts as president, banned gold ownership by decree.
He issued Executive Order 6102 that required Americans to surrender their gold coins and bullion to the Federal Reserve at an exchange rate he fixed.
Roosevelt did this because the government wanted a way to increase the money supply amid the Great Depression.
The gold standard was holding them back.
Reality itself prevented them from doing this.
And as public confidence waned in the banking system, people rushed to get their money out of banks.
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Because of an undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold.
Americans who didn't turn their gold into the government faced fines up to $10,000.
That's the equivalent of more than a quarter million dollars today.
They also faced up to a decade behind bars.
The Fed sicked the Secret Service on anyone who violated it.
Famous cases hit the papers.
A New York attorney called Frederick Barber Campbell attempted to withdraw his deposit of 27 bars of gold, worth about $3 million in today's exchange, from Chase National Bank in Manhattan.
Roosevelt's government filed criminal charges against him.
And though the prosecution failed on a technicality, his gold was confiscated by the government.
A jewelry store owner called Gus Farber in San Francisco was arrested for illegally selling gold coins in 1939.
Others were arrested and coordinated stings.
In 1971, Richard Nixon ended the gold standard altogether, so the government no longer had an interest in preventing gold ownership, though, of course, Americans certainly did.
The dollar, which is the best performing currency of the past hundred years, has declined by 95% between 1925 and 2025.
During the same period, gold rose from $20 an ounce to more than $4,000.
On New Year's Eve, 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation making it legal for Americans to own bullion again, finally.
The reality is there is no regulation over this, and which is why it's so difficult to really put a it's like it's like putting a band-aid over a gunshot wound because you just cannot stem the flow of companies that pop up after one is sued.
According to the Washington Post, over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies.
Federal regulators have sued four companies, two in the past year alone, claiming that investors were systematically charged as much as triple the coin's value.
It kind of sounds dirty coming out of my mouth as a conservative to say we need to regulate this issue, but that is the reality.
This is where government needs to step up and say, hey, there is harm being done to citizens and not just citizens, but their livelihoods, their life savings, and we need to do something about this instead of just suing individual companies and playing whack-a-mole like the SEC and the CFTC are doing.
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My name is Andrea McAvoy.
I used to do real estate, but I'm mostly a mom now.
I've been investing in precious metals since 2015, 2016.
This was an IRA that I had developed before I got married.
And it was basically a dead account at that point.
I had two-year-olds.
I was freshly postpartum.
And I was also pregnant.
I found out about Leo Capital through podcasts.
I do like to support the sponsors with the people that I listen to or try to.
It's like, you know, a soft intro.
We do that in real estate, right?
It's like that warm intro and you're like, oh, okay, well, these guys trust them.
So, you know, instead of just Googling a company, maybe I should, maybe I should try the company that they're sponsoring.
Because you assume that they kind of do some background due diligence.
You would want, you wouldn't want your reputation to now be tainted from a bad sponsor.
So I made the wrong assumption.
So I bought about $186,000 worth of gold and silver through my IRA.
The sales tactics, it was interesting.
I'm trying to remember exactly how he framed it with me.
But basically, what he said was, you know, that these coins might be the best opportunity for me because they tend to buffer when the market goes down.
So it doesn't, you don't, you don't get as much of a loss and they tend to really accelerate when the market goes up, which obviously sounds too good to be true.
Now that you think about it.
If you look at the actual contract, it says that like essentially something, something along the lines of that the commission will be discussed on the recorded call.
It should have been a red flag for me immediately.
And for me, I still remember the day that I was on the recorded call.
I was doing the dishes.
I had my two-year-old tugging at me.
You know, you got the water running.
You got the kid pulling at you.
You know, I'm doing, I'm shushing him, you know, trying to silently shush him, you know, so I can listen to the recording.
And your mind is not where it should be when a very large purchase is occurring.
They said 34%.
There is no way I heard 34%.
I heard 4%, right?
That sounds more in line with a very large purchase.
In April of 2024, I was, I think, in my second trimester of pregnancy at that time.
The market was so going so gangbusters.
So I went into my equity trust account and the $186,000 was down to $100,000, I think somewhere around $109,000.
And I mean, my heart sank.
And I was like, there's no way this can be possible.
Andrea reached out to Lear Capital, which is a major player in gold sales with over $200 million in revenue, according to court filings.
She wanted to know why her coins weren't rising as fast as the price of gold, since they were gold.
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So that's when I really went gangbusters and started running the numbers and figuring out not only did they take 35% as a commission, but then they somehow took another 20, 25% as a premium or a spread on the value.
Somewhere around the 120,000 is where I was, and I should have been somewhere around 213,000 had I bought bullion.
The company, Lear Capital, strongly discouraged her from telling her story to anyone.
Lear had reason to be worried about state attorneys general.
In 2022, they reached a $6 million settlement with the state of New York in a suit that alleged, quote, Lear fraudulently failed to disclose millions of dollars in commissions the company charged consumers.
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So what I did was I contacted several different AGs from different states.
In 2023, quote, at least 42 state and territory securities regulators have been investigating Lear for deceptive securities and commodities activity and misleading marketing.
Amid a multi-state lawsuit, Lear filed for bankruptcy and agreed to pay $5.5 million back to its customers.
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I put in a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, just started blasting them on X.
And it got, I mean, it's interesting because I think the gentleman that I was speaking to, I think he thought that he could kind of make me go away with, you know, giving me, you know, 10,000 or, you know, just kind of throwing me crumbs and just seeing if I'd go away.
He would leave me messages every day.
I mean, constantly.
And I wouldn't call him back.
And I would just send him a message.
I want to say it was through email, basically saying, unless you have my money, don't call me.
They use these tactics where they say, you don't have a case.
You accepted this agreement.
You verbally accepted this commission.
And you just got to just say, I don't accept that.
I don't accept it.
Predatory Sales Tactics Exposed00:10:34
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And you got to figure out how you can work around it because you can.
If you check, you'll see that Lear has very positive reviews online and a solid rating from the Better Business Bureau.
We obtained documents that showed that in exchange for issuing the refund, Lear pressured Andrea into leaving the company a five-star Google review and contacting the Better Business Bureau to report that she was satisfied with her dealings with Lear.
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You have to do your own research.
You have to look at the contracts.
You have to know what you're paying people.
It's really important.
You cannot just trust that people have your best interests in mind because they don't.
You don't just listen to some pundit online or on the TV and think that they have your best interests in mind.
They clearly have their interests in mind, right?
They're making money off of the advertising or in some way, shape, or form.
They're making money off of you doing this thing that they want you to do.
It leaves me sitting wondering as a conservative and as a consumer of media, wondering, do these guys have my best interests at heart or is it about money?
As a conservative and someone who's been reaching out to these folks for six, going on seven years now, it's frustrating that I see them pushing assets for companies that I know are going to defraud their viewers.
And the fact that these guys are making millions and millions of dollars a year, and even the smaller mid-sized ones are getting paid thousands of dollars a month, which just doesn't make sense for their audience size, so that they can sell and really leverage their viewers' trust to get them to go to these companies and to make these companies a lot of money all the while they're losing their life savings isn't inherently frustrating for me.
I've sent them my complaint that I filed, my whistleblower complaint that I filed.
And I pleaded with them, hey, please stop selling this because your viewers are being victimized by the same company that's paying you massive sums of money.
And that's one of the most frustrating things now.
Whenever I see these influencers, it's like, are your sponsors selling a legitimate product?
Are you peddling a bad product now?
I have to be questioning every single time that I see these guys selling something because it's like, how many millions of dollars are you getting paid to do that?
And do you actually care about getting me the truth?
Or do you care about lining your pockets?
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If you lend your name to it and your reputation, so the audience thinks, oh, it's probably okay.
Until it's not okay.
Until your audience gets scammed, gets robbed, gets cheated, and then the trust is eroded.
My name is Kristen, and I am a single mom seeking to raise my children and nurture an admonition of the Lord.
And I am a servant of Jesus Christ.
My mom and I are from Cambodia.
We lived through the Khmer Rouge and we came to America pretty much seeking the American dream.
My parents were in the labor camps and when the Khmer Rouge went in, they took their home, they took their business and they took all their possessions.
During the chaos during the war, the currency used was pretty much gold because the currency during that time, the paper currency was useless.
And so people would carry around and my mom just, you know, had a little scale in which they would cut up pieces of gold to exchange or to buy or to hire people.
And then with the current situation in America in which the American currency is being debased, mom and I discussed it and we thought that she would put whatever little money that she and my dad has to toward gold.
There were a lot of influencers who recommended different gold companies.
When we launched this channel two years ago, various gold companies reached out to us immediately and they offered us enormous amounts of money.
One of them offered nearly 20 million dollars.
At first, it seemed like a great idea.
It was natural.
We love gold.
We own gold.
We've been buying it for years in physical form.
But then the obvious question arose, how can a company that sells gold, which is a commodity set on the international markets whose price is transparent, how would they have $20 million to spend on marketing?
Commodities is a low-margin business by definition.
It didn't make any sense.
But now it does.
These businesses weren't selling gold as a commodity.
They were ripping off consumers, mostly conservative Christians.
The reality is that the influencers selling this scam were actually right on the most basic level.
Gold is the answer to economic volatility.
It is a hedge against fiat currency and the devaluation of the dollar.
And in fact, if the people we spoke to had bought gold at spot price and held it, they'd be much richer today.
Their instincts were right, but they were subverted.
So what we have done instead in good conscience and great enthusiasm is partner with one of the biggest gold wholesalers in the country.
We now sell gold with reasonable, totally transparent, upfront, clearly detailed margins, low margins.
But don't take our word for it, you can check for yourself.
The company is called Battalion Metals and the prices are on the website.
You know exactly what we make.
No, we're not going to get rich from this.
Yes, we will make it easier for the people who watch our show to buy physical gold if they want to.
There are no 34% markups.
There's no commemorative coin that's somehow worth more than its weight in gold.
There's no scam here.
Battalion makes money the way gold companies should make money by selling gold fairly and And transparently.