#10

Top Hoaxes, Scams, Frauds, Flim-Flams or Conspiracies
The Bre-X affair

Image posted by DGfromMTL

Bre-X's gold resource at Busang was a massive fraud. Encouraging gold values were intersected in many drill-holes and the project received a positive technical assessment by Kilborn. Crushed core samples had been falsified by salting with gold that has a wide variety of characteristics that had been subjected to mineralogical examination by Bre-X's consultants. The salting of crushed core samples with placer or supergene gold constitutes the most elaborate fraud in the history of mining. In 1997, Bre-X collapsed and its shares became worthless in one of the biggest stock scandals in Canadian history, and the biggest mining scandal of all time. ( Edited by DGfromMTL)

add link