Here is an uncomfortable question.
What is the name of the institution that legally owns your gold?
Not the company that sold it to you. The custodian. The entity holding title on behalf of your IRA, filing your reporting, and standing between you and a very bad tax outcome.
A lot of people cannot answer that. They know the dealer. They know the phone number on the brochure. The custodian is a name they signed next to once.
Which is backwards, because the dealer's job ended the day the metal shipped, and the custodian's job runs for the next twenty years.
Verifying a custodian is not difficult. It is six checks, it takes about an hour, and most of it is confirming facts that should be easy to confirm.
The value is not in catching a fraud. Outright fake custodians are rare. The value is in discovering how much independence you actually have, and most people find out they have less than they assumed.