Your Gold Silver Isn't Safe The Rosland Capital Collapse

I'm sure you've seen the news that Roslyn Capital just filed for Chapter 11. I'm William Devane. Trust is earned. For nearly 20 years, Roslyn Capital has built a reputation of trust, holding an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau while selling over a billion dollars worth of gold and precious metals. With Roslyn, there are no gimmicks, no hassles, and they have fast, reliable shipping. Ask yourself, are you safe? I'm going to go into that story today because this is a lot more than just overcharging. This is about something that fundamentally broke, and I'm going to try to cover this story in a way that only a dealer can, and in particular, someone like me who's worked on Wall Street for decades. Because a lot of what was happening behind the scenes is not something that's been discussed in these prior videos, and you need to understand what's happening so you can protect yourself for the future. Now, we know from some of the stats that have come out that there were 617 customers who were basically taken for about $60 million. Think about that, just the math. That's over 97,000 on average. Now, I can tell you from being here at Summit Metals, what that probably actually means is that you had some customers who were probably in the millions and others who were very small. So this hurt everyone equally the same, although for some, it was a far more painful hit than for others. That Chapter 11 was filed on July 2nd in the Central District of California. But here are some things you need to be thinking about. I'm going to cover that in detail. Now, I'm Eric with Summit Metals. We do the work institutions do for themselves in a way people like you and me can actually use. Before we go a step further, I put every chart, every number, and every level you're about to hear into a multi-page brief. It's the first link in the description of this video, and it is free. Download it now and follow along because the data in it is the kind of thing institutions run for themselves and rarely hand to people like you and me. Alright, as I'm recording right now, gold is sitting around $41.30 and silver around $60. We see that the ceasefire seems to be dead, so the markets are clearly gyrating. There's a lot going on, and we'll talk about that later in this particular video. Let's talk now about the machine, what actually happened at Roslin from my perspective. We know that $49 million was paid in to buy metals that were never delivered. We also find that there was $11.8 million sent in in metals for which the customer was never paid. In other words, they just took that metal. Now, think about this. When this company basically started in 2023, gold was around $1,500, and now, of course, back down to around $41.30. This dealer died doing what they were doing while gold was setting records. The filing is really important in this because their fulfillment model could not survive rising prices. That is a debtor's story. What no one has reported, and what you need to understand as well, is that both the SEC and the New York AG are looking into this case. I personally think this one is going to yield criminal charges. Everyone so far has only talked about civil issues, but when you talk about people actually losing $60 million, I think you're going to see the SEC and the New York AG take action. I'm going to explain why that is in particular when we get farther in. Now, what they basically did is what I don't think has been explained. They would take a customer order, and then they would do what we would call on Wall Street a naked short. In other words, they were playing the market. I want to spend just a second and talk about this naked short because this is kind of a Wall Street term that I know many of you are not as familiar with. When you go short, your risk is that the product can go up to the moon, and that creates unlimited risk because the price can essentially go to wherever it goes, and you then have to go buy at that higher price to be able to fulfill the other side of the transaction. A naked short is the riskiest transaction, in my opinion, that you can take on Wall Street, and that's exactly what this firm was doing. Worse, they were not doing it with their money. They were doing it with your money. That's what I'm reading in this filing. Now, once these old orders get filled, it creates a huge deficit if they played the wrong side of this market. In their case, it appears they just decided to not fill it at all and took the money. That, to me, I don't know how someone's not going to see that as a simple act of fraud, but we'll see as we get deeper into this analysis. Now, understand, real dealers hedge same day, often at the same minute that a transaction is taking place, so the float is never an issue. Now, let's talk about something else that they were also doing that was revealed in the filing. Here's what they were paying their salespeople. They're quoting somewhere between 15% and 35%. Understand, this is a market where our real margins can often be less than 1%, so how can you create a business where you're then paying someone 35%? It's completely illogical. I've hinted at this before. When you see these ads on Fox where they're talking about, open your IRA and invest $100,000 and we'll send you $10,000 back, it's fundamentally impossible. The math just does not work, so clearly something has to be going on behind the scenes because there's no way to generate that kind of capital off a 1% spread. It's literally impossible. The only way they can generate a commission that maybe has that kind of spread is selling you some esoteric product that when you turn around and try to sell it back, when you're trying to cash out your IRA or create a sale because you need money for a home or a car or a medical expense, you're going to find out in those scenarios the metal is worth what the metals work. If you bought something at some outrageous premium, good luck because you're probably never getting that money back, but the one guy who did get paid was the sales guy, that guy making 15% to 35%. In my opinion, that's simply unfair. It's not right. We mentioned, as I said before, that these people were advertising in particular on networks like Fox. Why? Because it has a conservative market. It has people that are interested in gold and silver. Fox itself is said to be a creditor in this lawsuit to the tune of $1.9 million. Interestingly enough too, their revenue they reported went down from $151 million to $98 million in just four years. That's a margin change of 18.4% down to 8.7%. Again, huge margins. And even though they were charging these crazy numbers and actually keeping the capital, they still are reporting a loss of $24 million. There are roughly 470 complaints by late June when this lawsuit was filed. Washington State has a consent order in 2022. The warning was public. The filing also indicates that they have zero metals inventory left. None. Those 617 people own now unsecured claims. They're behind lenders. They're behind lawyers. The honest expectation is that they are lucky if they even get cents on the dollar. The IRA products that they sell were obviously done at exceeding markups, ones that I think, again, are going to bring charges from the SEC and likely New York. Let's talk about the founder just a minute because that also is an important decision when you choose to buy metals. The founder's disclosed is Marin Alekshov. He was nine years before running Lear Capital, their sales floor. Lear itself filed for bankruptcy with $5.5 million paid in restitution. In that case, no one went to jail. But this playbook has sent dealers to federal prison twice. Tolvig in 2016, 30 months. New money filled old orders. Ross Hansen from Northwest Territorial Mint got 11 years, charged with 14 felonies. He lied about shipping and doing, I would presume, very much the same kind of things. So the question is, did they keep selling knowing that they could not deliver? My call is that they likely did, because how would you not know? This is very, very easy. Now, one of the things that's incredibly scary about this is that they list in the filing that the real asset still remaining is the customer database, meaning they're going to go to a court arbiter and in that filing, that chapter 11, they're going to see that as an asset. They're then going to try to sell that customer base to a like firm who's going to go hit the same customers again. Because here's something a lot of people don't realize in sales. When someone is vulnerable to an attack, they're often equally vulnerable to the next attack. So there will be people who see that customer list as being valuable and they will buy it. It also means that the confidentiality of those customers, in my opinion, is up for question. And I think that too is incredibly dangerous. Let's talk now for a second about what happens at Summit Metals and what I think should happen at other dealers you might be dealing with. When you buy a product, we fulfill that out of our inventory. In other words, when we show that we're long the product, we show it's available on our website, we're basically saying we are in a position to deliver that to you immediately. Why? Because we already own the metal in inventory. And that inventory is completely hedged. So we're not subject to what a lot of people think. In other words, if that market goes up or the market goes down, we are effectively indifferent because we have hedged those positions. And ultimately, that protects you because you know we're in a position to actually deliver what you paid for. So that hedging process is very important. And I think you will find that there are many dealers, including online dealers, who are not actively hedging their positions. I consider that a risk because just like again, as I mentioned, we saw at the end of January, the metals market can move very, very fast. You do not want to be in that scenario. Roslyn customers were in a very different position. When they placed an order, they sat on the order. They took a huge commission out of the order according to the filing. And then at that point, they decided to play the market. If the market went down, they then would go in and buy your order and they made a little extra capital. So they were playing the game. I don't agree with that. I can tell you that is not how we operate at Summit Metals. And I personally think it's fundamentally wrong and something that should never happen at any firm in which you choose to deal. Now, this gold market and silver market continues to vacillate. And that's the reason these hedges are important. Look what's happening on the ceasefire front as we speak right now. It's on, it's off. These things are changing. They're in flux all the time. And I know that's frustrating for a lot of you in the market during this period where we're seeing these vacillations. I don't think that's going to stop. I told you to buy in a disciplined way and keep powder dry. In other words, keep money so as the market's vacillating, you have ability to continue to add systematically, programmatically to your positions. We provide a product just for that at Summit Metals. It's called Auto Invest. So understand very clearly, gold did not fail these people. The industry selling it did. Now, we are not providing you financial or legal advice. I want to be very clear about that. I'm not an attorney. All the things that I'm saying today, you need to research yourself. If you feel the need, discuss with your own lawyer, discuss with your own financial advisor. You should do that before you make any financial decisions. But I'm telling you right now that Summit Metals is a company that is structured to do this the right way to handle your transactions as you would want them handled. And we're not going to deviate from that course. So thank you for tuning in. I really feel badly for those people that were taken in this particular transaction. I hope they get all their money back. I don't think it's going to happen, sadly. But that being the case, please do your homework and deal with quality companies and know that you're getting your metal. Also understand, a lot of people in these videos are going to tell you, always take delivery. And that's true. If you can take delivery and you can secure it and do all those things, do it. Absolutely. Then you know you have what you have. But if you're choosing to vault, which many of our customers do, just ask and make sure that your metal is owned. Number one, it's in the vault. Have them send you a picture or something like that if you need. Have them prove to you that it's allocated, that it's not mixed with other customers, that it's in your own bin, that it's in an insured vault. Those are very important questions to ask. That's what I do with my own metal, so you know. All right. Well, thank you for tuning in. I hope we can talk about more positive things as we move down the road. And happy stacking.