South African gold mine salt shaker smuggling

Chemistry-lab worker smuggled gold out as gold chloride (visually indistinguishable from table salt) in his daily egg-and-salt lunch. Defeated metal scanners because gold chloride is not metallic.

My favorite story was not from Leach and Garner, it was from South Africa. One guy was working in one of the gold mines, in the chemistry lab. He brought his lunch every morning — he'd have a hard-boiled egg every day, with a little container of salt. He put it on his egg, and everybody knew that's why he had it. Then he started taking, instead of salt, gold chloride, which looks just like table salt. He could produce it in the lab, and it wouldn't show up on the metal scanners because it wasn't metallic. They finally caught up with him.

Chem-lab worker filled his lunch salt shaker with gold chloride (white crystalline, looks like sodium chloride), carried out ~1 ounce of gold per day. Used as the punchline of the gold-theft sequence and to motivate aqua-regia gold chemistry. ## Figures referenced

My favorite story comes out of South Africa. One guy was working in one of the gold mines in South Africa in a chem lab, and he would bring in a hard-boiled egg with his lunch and a little salt shaker for lunch. But when he went home, he actually disposed of the salt and filled it up with gold chloride — a white salt that looks like sodium chloride. He was carrying out about an ounce of gold a day. People are ingenious — now they steal gold in their lunches.