Sold out in January’s surge and got 3 million yen! The “unexpected treasure” of gold’s soaring price attracts attention.

Unexpected Treasures Selling at High Prices

On January 29, gold reached an all-time high, soaring to 30,248 yen per gram. This was due to concerns about the U.S. monetary policy and geopolitical risks. While there is demand for conversion as a safe asset to avoid risk, speculative money trading is also pushing up prices, spurred by the weak yen.

The price crashed on February 2 and is currently hovering around 26,000-28,000 yen, but the demand for gold is increasing year after year and will only continue to rise over the long term.

Amid such a surge in gold prices, a certain “treasure” is said to be attracting attention.

It is “gold prizes” that can be exchanged for payouts at pachislot parlors. Also called “special prizes,” they contain plates or chips that contain pure gold and can be cashed in at the prize exchange. There were three different weights of enclosed gold: 0.1g, 0.3g, and 1g (1g has now been discontinued and 1g silver has appeared). Many people immediately took them to a prize exchange to cash them in, but they could also take them home.

However, due to the rise in the price of gold, it seems that if you take it to a precious metals store today, you can cash it in for a higher price than at a prize exchange. It seems like a joke, but some people are actually making money.

Precious metal stores also welcome gold prizes from pachislot machines. When we asked a store that buys precious metals, they replied , “We can buy them without any problem.

To begin with, the value of gold prizes and the redemption value at the prize exchange are set at the same level. In the past, gold prizes have been raised (the number of balls required to redeem a prize has been raised) as the price of gold has increased.’ The price of 1g prizes, which was 2,500 yen until October 2007, reached 9,000 yen in 2010, and the purchase of 1g prizes has been gradually stopped since around 2011 because the price was close to the upper limit of 15,560 yen (including consumption tax) that can be offered as a prize.

Is there any legal risk?

It was not only pure pachislot enthusiasts who took notice of this rise in gold prices, but also speculative buyers. Mr. A, who enjoys playing pachislot, has been collecting gold prizes since early 2011 and sold them all in January of this year. I was confident that the price would go up, so I was able to hold on to them patiently,” he said.

“In January ’25, Trump was inaugurated as president for the second time. I was confident that the market would absolutely move based on the trends from his last inauguration. I knew from his comments on social media that the market would be volatile, so I speculated thinking, ‘This year is going to be rough. Stocks would have been fine, but I focused on gold. It was easy to collect gold as a physical commodity. So I decided to collect gold from pachislot prizes, which I had been thinking about for a while.

He went to the pachinko parlor every week and began collecting prizes without exchanging them for cash. He said that there were many times when he had to sell the prizes, but he never gave them up because “pachinko was half of my hobby.

He says, “My hobby of pachinko had just turned into ‘accumulating money,’ so I felt like, ‘I don’t have to sell it now. Especially from August to October last year, when the price of gold soared over 3,000 yen to over 20,000 yen, I wondered whether I should sell or not. Right around this time, pachinko parlors were raising prizes due to the rising price of gold and silver, so I didn’t think it would go up to 30,000 yen, but I was confident that it would exceed 25,000 yen. It wasn’t until around this time that I actually started collecting special prizes,” said Mr. A.

There were more than 100 gold prizes that I collected outside of halls through online auctions and other means.’ After 2011, the halls stopped handling 1g gold prizes due to the rise in gold prices, so most of them were bought and sold on the Internet. He succeeded in selling all the gold prizes he had collected during January, and the profit he earned was more than 3 million yen.

Is there any problem with buying and selling gold prizes outside of the prize exchange? We asked Hiroki Tanaka, an attorney at the Osaka branch of ATOM Law Office.

When a prize is received as a prize, ownership of the item is transferred to the person who received it. Wherever you sell your property, you are basically free to do so.

However, even if the special prizes given to customers by pachinko halls are “new” immediately after delivery from the manufacturer, under the interpretation of the law, they are “treated as secondhand articles even if they have not been inspected or used at the time they are handed over (traded) from the hall to the customer.

Therefore, if you repeatedly purchase and resell special prizes for profit, you risk being considered an unauthorized secondhand dealer, which could result in criminal penalties for violating the Secondhand Articles Dealer Act. However, the act of selling prizes obtained as a result of one’s own game because the price of gold has risen is simply “disposal of one’s own assets” and does not fall under the category of “business (business).

In principle, there is no legal problem in selling or buying special prizes outside of an exchange, such as at a precious metals store, but depending on the manner of sale, there is a risk of violating the Secondhand Articles Dealer Act.

Currently, it is not possible to exchange 1g gold prizes for payouts because the handling of such prizes has been discontinued. The remaining gold prizes are 0.3g and 0.1g, but if the price of gold rises further, they can still earn a profit. Perhaps you may be able to get an unexpected price for the gold prizes that have been forgotten and left in your possession as well.

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