Do Online Gold Dealers Allow Your Family the Right to Financial Privacy?

People walk by the New York Stock Exchange on July 02, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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One of the primary reasons why investors like us purchase physical precious metals, aside from inflation protection, is our family legacy's financial privacy.

The right to financial privacy is something that no American should take for granted. The advantage of holding assets that aren't subject to excessive fees, non-owner access, surveillance, digitization, and potential confiscation is invaluable.

Cash stored at a bank is subject to all of the above from either the bank itself or the government. I covered new bank confiscatory loopholes in depositor terms in a previous Epoch Times article titled "Major US Banks Amend Agreement to Freeze Your Money on Bank Failure."

In contrast, non-CUSIP gold and silver coins or bars stored at a privately segregated depository are 100 percent private and accessible only by the owners, beneficiaries, or permitted parties. I have written about CUSIP in an Epoch Times article titled "American Bankers Association Targets Precious Metals Owners Through CUSIP."

Well, everything's about to change.

Soon, the right to privacy may be "indirectly" revoked by the government through a sleight-of-hand maneuver that most precious metals investors may not even be aware of.

Depending on where you bought your precious metals, your personal data about your metals holdings may be recorded and subject to review by the government.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is the hand of the government intervening in private business. It's also 100 percent legal. Here's how it happened and how it might affect your precious metals transactions in the future.

A Monopoly Is Forming as Top US Super Dealers Merge

Monopolies are generally unfavorable, as they're anti-competitive. But this monopoly is not one concerning vendors; instead, it involves information-gathering. How so? Let's start from the beginning.

In 2019, right before the pandemic created a sales spike in physical precious metals, Provident Metals was acquired by the premiere online dealer JM Bullion.

On Feb. 9, 2021, A-Mark Precious Metals Inc. purchased JM Bullion for close to $180 million, and here's where the problems start.

The government will only allow us to know of a few companies in the United States that can purchase bullion coins in bulk directly from the U.S. Mint.

These government contractors are called authorized purchasers, or APs. A-Mark Precious Metals Inc. is one of them. So what's the big deal?

In order to become an AP, you are required to follow specific procedures. One of them, on page 7 of the application, requests the following:

"Applying firms are requested to label 'proprietary/confidential' on each page of the documentation submitted, which contains proprietary and/or confidential information that should not be made available for public release. Upon receipt, all documents will become the property of the U.S. government and will not be returned.”

APs Help the Government Track Its Citizens' Private Gold and Silver Holdings

So if you bought precious metals from any of the online mega dealers like Apmex, Provident, or JM Bullion, all of your private transaction information is now in the hands of the government.

These government contractors are tough to avoid if you are in the market for gold and silver. Their sites gather your search data directly through Google's "Tag Manager." Next, they feed your browsing history into Programmatic Display Marketing software to tantalize you to buy their products weeks after your visit. They spend millions of dollars per week and cut margins to the bone to ensure you buy from their government-linked organization.

If part of your objective as a precious metals investor was to avoid digitization and fungibility or to exercise your right to financial privacy, your privacy might have been abolished if your dealer's transactional records are under the ownership of an AP.

Take JM Bullion. The data from their 2020 sales records are astonishing;

• $1.49 billion in net sales; • 1.3 million total users (up approximately 30 percent year-over-year), of which more than 300,000 purchased products during the year (up approximately 70 percent year-over-year); • 794,000 orders processed (up approximately 80 percent year-over-year); and • More than 21 million ounces of silver (up approximately 120 percent year-over-year) and more than 500,000 ounces of gold (up approximately 170 percent year-over-year) sold.

The fact that this data with client users—buyers and sellers—will now be in the government's hands is nothing short of a significant infringement on privacy and a disruption of many investors' objectives to maintain the privacy of their holdings.

Fortunately, a few dealers are not subject to the government's overreach of client data. GSI Exchange is one of them.

And if you read our posts regularly, this is one reason we always emphasize non-CUSIP gold and silver. The American Bankers Association does not track non-CUSIP gold and silver, and hence it's not as readily subject to confiscatory outlines, should certain laws be activated in times of national emergency to justify the seizure of precious metals.

Ownership of non-CUSIP metals stored in your safe at home or in a private depository are 100 percent owned by your estate and accessible only by you or your beneficiaries.

At GSI Exchange, we understand the sacred value of your financial privacy and would never be instrumental to the government's overreaching intrusion into what you buy, sell, or hold.

Contact us at 833-GSI-GOLD. You'll receive a complimentary copy of our Bank Failure Survival Guide and the secret the bankers don't want you to know, "The Fungible Gold & Silver CUSIP List," free of charge.

GSI Exchange is an A-plus-rated firm with the BBB, and AAA-rated with the BCA, Forbes Finance Council listed, and Platinum Dun & Bradstreet verified. Call 833-GSI-GOLD or visit us on the web at GSIExchange.com to get more information or set up an account to convert savings into gold or silver and rollover IRA or 401(k) into physical precious metal IRA accounts, tax-free and penalty-free.

By Anthony Allen Anderson, Senior Partner

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