Norwegians duped into stashing bought gold in forests and parks

People in Norway are being targeted by a con in which they are talked into buying gold and then abandoning it in woodland or public parks.

According to Finans Norge, the fraud starts with victims being talked into buying gold, which the con artists promise to safeguard for them.

An interview with ABC Nyheter says a meeting is then arranged between the two sides. The scammer subsequently claims they cannot attend, and the victim is urged to leave the gold in a public location.

The way some victims were lured appears to match “pig-butchering” playbooks: a simulated romance, then a lengthy trust-building period, before the request.

Because gold is hard to identify, the people affected struggle to track down or recover what these frauds brought in.

Norway is hardly the only place where such fraud occurs. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded approximately 725 complaints and $311.8 million in losses from “gold courier scams.”

These scams are described in much the same way, except that victims generally meet with the courier. That may be because Americans, compared with Norwegians, live in a low-trust society and are not willing to leave their gold in the woods.