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April 23

Are these actual gold bars or what?

The Toronto Pearson International Airport heist of 2023 has been in the news again recently because a number of people have been arrested for the crime. A large part of what was stolen consisted of bars of gold, which have not been recovered (police believe the gold was melted down so it could not be traced). Since it would be impossible to photograph the actual gold that was stolen, news reports have often illustrated the theft with other bars of gold—for example, these photos: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

My question is about this photo [6] which I saw used in that way. It caught my eye because I've never seen a depiction of bars of gold shaped like that: for one thing, they would not stack together well. The color also looks a bit odd, but as the other photos show, that could be a matter of lighting. What the shape of those objects does remind me of is cases for eyeglasses. Is it possible that they are actually gold-colored cases of plastic or something, intended to hold small bars of gold? Or are there actual gold bars that shape, or what? Just curious. --142.112.220.50 (talk) 16:20, 23 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The article gold bar discusses minted bars (which are very finely made, by cutting and pressing a flat gold sheet) and cast bars, which is what you get when you pour metal into a mold - and are thus rather irregular. The bars in your photo look, broadly, like the latter. Gold is sold (at retail) in some pretty small sizes, such as 1 or 5 gm, so that might very well be what that photo shows. Gold bars for sale (legitimately) will almost always be stamped with the originating mint's name, the mass and purity, and often a serial number - those in that last photo don't. So it's certainly not impossible that the photo (which is surely either a file photo or a stock photo) is of actual small-mass cast gold ingots. But (as with all stock photos) it's certainly possible that it's just any old thing shown as an illustration. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 20:34, 23 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good point about the absence of stamped text. It occurred to me to see where the earliest instance tineye.com could find of that same image was: it turned out to be yahoo.com, and using the Wayback Machine to read it, I found that it was a Bloomberg news item from 2022. And it showed the image without a caption, so I'm still none the wiser as to what it actually shows. --142.112.220.50 (talk) 07:39, 24 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

At first I thought it was an image from Stable Diffusion, but then I looked at reverse image search. The caption is clearly available in the Bloomberg news item and is credited to professional photographer Anindito Mukherjee. The article was published in March 2024, not 2022.[7] As it turns out, your suspicion that this was just a matter of lighting is correct. This image of gold from 2014 demonstrates the same lighting, albeit from a different angle. I seem to recall a photo of silver bars demonstrating similar lighting properties. Viriditas (talk) 03:22, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad you found a photo credit, but the caption does not actually say what the objects in the photo are, and that's clearly a reuse of the image since one image here is the one from 2022 that I was talking about. And the lighting might explain the color, but not the non-stackable shape of the things. --142.112.220.50 (talk) 05:52, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at the second image I linked to above. To me, they are the same kind of gold. Viriditas (talk) 20:00, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It might be, but I don't think it's clear. Anyway, thanks for thinking about it. --142.112.220.50 (talk) 07:57, 27 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Take another look! I spent about ten minutes comparing the two images. Look closely at the rounded edges. I'm convinced they are the same. The lighting is super deceptive, and if I hadn't seen things like this before, I would have been thrown off. Although most people notice these things in photographs, I've seen this kind of thing in real time with just my eyes. In the 1980s, I was exposed to the work of M. C. Escher for the first time, and this is the kind of thing he would play around with. Viriditas (talk) 08:31, 27 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]