When you take into consideration the live state of the American economy and the forever increasing rise in gold prices , it is no wonder people are rooting out their broken gold and platinum jewelry and are pawning them to cash for gold buyers because they need to make some extra income to lower their extra debts to to get out of debt. let’s say you are in the same situation you will want to methodically do your homework before giving away your precious metals to just any gold brokers in that there are an ever increasing amount of fraudulent players in the gold buying business who will without conscience prey on your desperate situation and reward you next to nothing for your precious jewelry. Even though this way of doing business may not be a scam, it is in my opinion, wrong and I feel obligated to warn those of you who are thinking of exchanging your used gold jewelry to be certain to avoid companies that are acting as middle men and to conduct business only with refineries or gold buyers that have their own refineries The fact is, gold buyer are doing nothing more than acting as brokers between you and a precious metal refinery and therefore they will reward you approximately one third of the value for your fine jewelry and instantly unload it directly to a gold refiner themselves therefore keeping the largest share and you get a few measly bucks. Not so long ago, Fox news implemented a sort of undercover operation, in that they submitted 3 of the same pieces of gold jewelry to 3 individual cash for gold companies and waited for the payment and while 3 of the businesses did in fact forward a payment for the used jewelry, only 1 of those cash for gold buyers actually paid the current market value while the other 2 gold buyers payed about 30% of today’s real value. The 2 gold buying companies that that payed out 1/3 of the market value were acting as brokers while the third cash for gold company that payed the true value did have their own metal refinery, so it is customer beware in this industry and I highly recommend that you do your utmost before parting with old gold jewelry