We fix mistakes in the open

28 July 2026 · Selling a Krugerrand

We stated that melting a South African coin without approval carries “a fine or up to six months’ imprisonment”. That understated the penalty roughly tenfold. Section 34 of the South African Reserve Bank Act 90 of 1989 provides, for an offence under paragraph (k), a fine of up to R50 000 or imprisonment of up to five years, or both. Corrected.

28 July 2026 · What goes wrong when South Africans sell gold

Three corrections on one page. First, we wrote that a fee taken off the weight is worse than the same percentage taken off the price because it “compounds against the rate”. That is arithmetically false: weight times rate times 0.8 is the same number either way. What actually differs is that a deduction taken off the weight is invisible without your own scale, which is the point worth making, and the page now makes it. Second, we said no South African gold buyer we looked for had any Trustpilot presence. That was wrong; several do. Third, we described the melt column as recomputing against the live board when it is deliberately frozen at the check date, and the column header said “today”. We have also disclosed that the review corpus is concentrated, with one business accounting for about half of it, and softened a claim about the spread between advertised rates to reflect only the listings we actually recorded.

28 July 2026 · Verify a gold buyer, and Cash-for-gold scams

We described section 20 of the Precious Metals Act as making it an offence to buy “gold” without checking the seller. The offence is narrower: it covers unwrought and semi-fabricated precious metal, meaning raw and part-processed material, not a finished chain or ring. The scope is now stated accurately on both pages.

28 July 2026 · Tax on selling gold

We cited the SARS ABC of Capital Gains Tax for Individuals, Issue 13, as the source for an annual exclusion of R50 000. That guide is written to an earlier year of assessment and states R40 000, so it did not support our own figure. The 2026/27 figures are now sourced to the SARS annual exclusion table and Budget Review 2026, and the tax year is stated. We have also removed a reference to Binding General Ruling (VAT) 43, which concerns input tax on second-hand gold and does not address the zero-rating we cited it for.

28 July 2026 · Why gold is expensive here

A frequently asked question said the dollar gold price “nearly doubled” over a period the body of the same page describes as a rise of about 77 percent. The FAQ now carries the same figure as the page.

28 July 2026 · Why South Africa knows gold

We published that South Africa mined about 99 tonnes of gold in 2024, ranking twelfth in the world and third in Africa. Those three figures came from two different datasets and cannot be combined. The 99-tonne figure is the World Gold Council series, which counts by-product and estimated artisanal output; on that basis South Africa is thirteenth and third in Africa. The twelfth-place ranking is the United States Geological Survey series, which puts South African production at 90 tonnes and, because it uses Mali’s official reported output rather than an artisanal estimate, places South Africa second in Africa behind Ghana. We now quote the USGS series throughout and say so: about 90 tonnes, twelfth in the world, second in Africa. The 1970 peak of roughly 1,000 tonnes, about two-thirds of world output, is unchanged and verified.

28 July 2026 · What you need to sell gold

We wrote that the Precious Metals Act came into force in 2007 and has not been amended since. That is true of the Act’s own sections but misleading as a statement about the rules in force, because the Act defines itself to include the regulations made under it, and those were amended in 2008 and again in 2014. The sentence is corrected to say both things.

28 July 2026 · Every page (machine-readable dates)

The modification date embedded in each page’s structured data was being set to the time of the daily price fetch rather than the date the page was actually edited, so pages including this one advertised to search engines that they had changed on days when nothing changed, and contradicted our own sitemap on twelve URLs. Both now read from a single source, so a page states one modification date or none.

27 July 2026 · How to buy gold, and hallmarks explained

We described the Mint and Rand Refinery together as a route to buy a Krugerrand "at source". Rand Refinery does not sell to the public: its own customer page states it acts as agent for gold producers and does not transact with individuals in their private capacity. The buying channels are corrected. Separately, our hallmark page implied every real gold item carries a fineness stamp. Plenty of older, handmade and heavily worn pieces carry none, and an unmarked piece is not fake, it simply has to be tested.

27 July 2026 · The gold board, and every per-karat page

We were dividing the feed’s per-gram price by 0.999 a second time, on the assumption that it represented 24ct at 99.9% rather than pure gold. It represents pure gold. Every per-karat figure was therefore about 0.1% too high, and our own per-gram and per-ounce numbers disagreed with each other by roughly R68 an ounce. The basis is corrected: each karat is now its legal purity times the pure price, which reconciles exactly with the ounce price we publish.

27 July 2026 · Tax on selling gold

The annual capital gains exclusion was published as R40 000 and the year-of-death exclusion as R300 000. SARS has raised these to R50 000 and R440 000. The worked example was recalculated accordingly: the tax on a R100 000 gain at the top marginal rate is R9 000, not R10 800.

27 July 2026 · What gold buyers actually pay

We wrote that the cash-for-gold counters we named do not publish a rate you can check before you arrive. That was wrong. Some do publish a rand-per-gram buying table, and one carried a "last updated" line that is generated in the reader’s own browser rather than reflecting when the rates changed. The page now describes what each buyer actually does, with the date we checked it.

27 July 2026 · Verify a gold buyer

We stated that a named buyer carries the three registrations this page tells you to ask for. We had not inspected any licence, so we should never have said it. The claim is removed. We do not certify anyone’s registrations; ask to see them yourself and confirm them with the regulator.

27 July 2026 · Methodology, and the machine-readable summary

The methodology page said the board is refreshed through the trading day. It is refreshed once a day, in the morning. Our llms.txt file also listed a named analyst who does not exist, at a page that was never published. Both are corrected; the material is published by the Goldza Project Team and carries no personal byline.