Off topic9 Jan 2015 19:40
See this story from Canada. I am in no way suggesting that anything like this is happening here. It just happens to be a mining story and just shows the extremes some people will go to:
Bre-X was a group of companies in Canada. A major part of the group, Bre-X Minerals Ltd. based in Calgary, was involved in a major gold mining scandal when it reported it was sitting on an enormous gold deposit at Busang, Indonesia (on Borneo). Bre-X bought the Busang site in March 1993 and in October 1995 announced significant amounts of gold had been discovered, sending its stock price soaring. Originally a penny stock, its stock price reached a peak at CAD $286.50 (split adjusted) in May 1996 on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE), with a total capitalization of over CAD $6 billion. Bre-X Minerals collapsed in 1997 after the gold samples were found to be a fraud.
Busang's gold resource was estimated by Bre-X's independent consulting company, Kilborn Engineering (a division of SNC-Lavalin of Montreal), to be approximately 70,000,000 troy ounces (2,400 short tons; 2,200 t). Reports of resource estimates of up to 200,000,000 troy ounces (6,900 short tons; 6,200 t) were never made by Bre-X though the property was described as having this potential by John Felderhof, Bre-X's Vice-President for Exploration, in an interview with Richard Behar of Fortune Magazine. 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.