The meeting point had been arranged: near 81st Street and Broadway on the Upper West Side.
It was there, in broad daylight, that two men approached each other on a Wednesday in April 2025. One of the men, a 67-year-old New Yorker, transported a bag of $9 million in gold bars, each one the size of a chocolate bar, that the police said someone online had instructed him to buy and hand over.
The man did exactly as he was told, believing that he could secure his financial assets, which an alert on his computer had led to believe were compromised, the authorities said.
The other man took sack of gold and fled on foot, according to the police. The first man had been the victim of an online fraud.
Now, more than a year and a half after the deceit, the New York Police Department is asking for the public’s help in identifying the man who ran off with the gold bars in connection with a grand larceny investigation.
Investigators this week released security camera footage and images of the man suspected of taking the bars.
Isaac Kahan, the owner of Bullion Trading LLC, a gold and silver dealer in Manhattan’s Diamond District, wondered about the sheer logistics that were involved in the heist.
Each of the gold bars weighs one kilogram, about 2.2 pounds, according to the police. While the dollar value of gold has fluctuated since 2025, the current cost of a one-kilo bar is about $130,000, according to Mr. Kahan, meaning that $9 million would buy about 69 gold bars and weigh more than 150 pounds.
“I don’t even know how he would be able to carry that,” Mr. Kahan said in an interview on Friday. “You can’t even lift that.”
From his decades as a precious metals wholesaler, Mr. Kahan said, he had become all too familiar with such fraud schemes, which he noted typically target people in their 70s and 80s, and seek to get them to liquidate their assets to buy gold.
About once every two weeks, Mr. Kahan’s business will receive somewhat cryptic requests from potential clients to buy gold bars, he said, adding that it used to happen on a daily basis. Unlike investors, victims of frauds show little interest in the weight and purity of gold, he said.
“When a person starts throwing the dollar amount first to me, that’s a telltale sign right away,” Mr. Kahan said.
A few years ago, while his company was closed for the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, it received several online orders from people who had been targets of such schemes, he said. The business was able to cancel some of the transactions, according to Mr. Kahan, who said one victim’s daughter had contacted him after noticing a suspicious wire transfer for $150,000.
“It was heartbreaking,” Mr. Kahan said, adding that gold is essentially “impossible” to trace.
An older woman in Florida was the target of a similar scheme this May, according to the F.B.I., which said the victim received an email claiming to be from Amazon and telling her to call a phone number because her bank account had been breached.
A person claiming to be associated with the bank told the woman that her identity had been stolen and that her Social Security number had been compromised, which would require her to speak with another individual, who claimed to be an agent with the Federal Trade Commission.
That individual instructed the woman to write a check for $101,220 to buy 21 gold bars that she delivered to a masked man in a Volvo at a Sunoco gas station near the victim’s home in McIntosh, Fla., the authorities said.
When the woman received directions to buy another $500,000 in gold bars, a friend became suspicious, according to federal authorities, who began an investigation and this month announced the indictments of 10 people in connection with the fraud scheme.
It was not clear if there was any connection between the cases in Florida and New York.
The F.B.I. field office in New York did not respond to a request for comment on Friday about the gold bars that were stolen from the man on the Upper West Side.
Mr. Kahan said that he flags suspicious gold purchases for the F.B.I. and arranges for agents to speak to people who he fears could be the targets of frauds.
“We do try to slow the process down,” he said.
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