Updated September 23, 2026, 9:22 a.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story judged a viral YouTube video from its title and linked sources alone. We have since read the video's transcript and rewritten that section to reflect what it actually claims, most of which is corroborated.
In April 2025, police outside Oslo got a tip about a van swerving between lanes on the E18 highway in Bærum, a suburb west of the city. When officers stopped it, the cargo turned out to be American Eagle silver coins, tens of thousands of them. A second van that arrived while they were there was carrying tens of thousands more. The count came to 66,860 one-ounce coins, which Norway's economic-crime police, Økokrim, value at no less than 25 million kroner (about $2.65 million).
On September 17, the Oslo district court convicted three Norwegian citizens of aggravated money laundering, which means handling property they knew came from crime. According to the Norwegian paper VG, one man was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, a woman to six months, and a second man to a ten-month suspended sentence. The court acquitted two British men who had been charged with negligently laundering the coins by transporting them, and prosecutors are considering an appeal. The verdict is not final: either side can appeal it, and none of the coverage we read names the convicted defendants.
Where the silver came from
Økokrim says only that the coins "derive from aggravated investment frauds in the USA." Its December 2025 statement adds two facts. The agency has been helping American investigators since 2018. And this was not the first hoard: in 2019, during a search of an address at Jongskollen in Bærum, it seized 79,500 silver coins worth about 17 million kroner at the time. The April 2025 vans held coins that had escaped that 2019 search. Public prosecutor Jon André Hvoslef-Eide said at the verdict that "it is gratifying that the silver has been recovered and that a verdict has now been handed down," and that the U.S. victims can only get their money back once the court process is over.
Neither Økokrim's statements nor the AP's verdict report names the American case, but the prosecution pointed to it at trial. Norway's public broadcaster NRK covered the trial in May under the headline "Kobler sølvfunn på E18 til forsvunnet amish-skatt" ("Links E18 silver find to missing Amish treasure"). NRK reported that Økokrim and the FBI raided a villa in Bærum in 2019, and summed up the American case in one line: "a former American Amish pastor defrauded religious Americans of over 130 million kroner," about $13 million. "We believe there are so many connections between the coins that were found last Easter and the American criminal case in 2019," Hvoslef-Eide said, as quoted by NRK. All but one of the five defendants denied guilt. One of them, an 80-year-old man, explained, according to NRK, that he had been told the coins belonged to "a Christian savings association in America, with good Christian values," which had turned its members' deposits into silver through trading.
NRK did not name the pastor, and we found no Norwegian source that does. One U.S. federal prosecution fits every detail NRK gives: the year, the religious pitch, the roughly $13 million, and a house outside Oslo full of silver. That identification is ours, drawn from the public record on both sides, not an official confirmation.
In November 2019, a federal grand jury in South Dakota indicted Nathan Peachey of Pennsylvania and John Winer of New Mexico. That was the same year as the first Bærum seizure, and a year after Økokrim says it began helping U.S. investigators. Prosecutors said the men, working with others, took nearly $13 million from investors. The lead IRS investigator described the pitch as returns of 20 to 25 percent, with part of the money going to orphanages, homes and other religious and humanitarian projects. They ran it through a set of entities that prosecutors described as fake, one of them called "Jericho Outreach – Norway." According to the Justice Department, the proceeds went on "a luxury residence located in a suburb of Oslo, Norway," renovations, a Mercedes-Benz, travel, and "nearly $4 million in silver." Sioux Falls TV station KELOLAND, which obtained the IRS evidence photos in 2021, reported that "the defendants purchased $2.8 million in silver coins, which were discovered on pallets inside this home in Norway." The station reported that, according to prosecutors, "not a single dime went into those projects."
A jury convicted both men of wire fraud and money laundering in November 2021. Peachey was sentenced in February 2022 to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to forfeit the Norwegian house, the car and roughly $4 million in silver coins. Winer was sentenced to nearly 22 years. Lubova Burkute, a Latvian citizen who lived and operated in Norway, was extradited to South Dakota, pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy, and was sentenced in December 2022 to time served and $11,835,573 in restitution. Two other men charged in the scheme were fugitives as of KELOLAND's 2021 reporting: Lorin Rosier, described as living in Norway, and former Arizona detective Frederick Arias. We did not find reporting on where either stands now.
The figures in the two countries' records do not reconcile neatly. The U.S. figures are dollars spent on silver bought during the scheme, while the Norwegian figures are coin counts valued in kroner at later silver prices. We have not tried to force them together. The match rests on the prosecutor's own tie to the 2019 U.S. case, the place, the religious pitch, the silver and the forfeited Oslo-area house, not on the arithmetic.
The viral video: what it gets right, and where it goes too far
A YouTube video posted September 22 by the silver-investing channel Silver Slayer, "The U.S. Mint's NEW Silver Scandal Is Insane," puts the Norway case next to a second story and presents the U.S. Mint as sitting "right smack dab in the middle of both." We read the video's transcript and checked each factual claim in it against its sources. Most of them hold up. The one that does not is the connection the title draws between the Mint and the silver fraud.
Most of the video is about gold, and that part is well supported. It rests on a New York Times investigation published in April, which traced gold in the Mint's supply chain to a Colombian mine in territory controlled by the Clan del Golfo, a cartel the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in December 2025. Coverage of the Times findings puts the value of those Colombian bars arriving in Texas at about $255 million over roughly a year, where a refinery melted them together with gold from other suppliers; at one point the video gives the figure as $355 million, which is wrong. The Mint had said its gold "came entirely from the United States"; after the Times presented its findings, it called the United States its "primary" source and said it was taking steps to better track where its gold comes from. According to Numismatic News, Treasury's own Office of Inspector General has found that "the Mint cannot ensure most gold coins produced are minted from newly mined U.S. gold in compliance with the Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a review "focused on ensuring that the U.S. Mint's gold suppliers comply with the law," and on May 14 a letter to Bessent posted by the Senate Finance Committee demanded a public audit and said new plans for investigating gold sources were "reportedly overdue." We found no public result from Treasury's review as of this writing. The video also raises the 24-karat Trump coin issued for the 250th anniversary. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have asked the Mint to halt it, citing "the possibility that the planned Trump coin could be produced using cartel-linked gold." That is a concern the senators raised, not a finding that the coin contains such gold, and the video frames it as a possibility.
Two parts of the gold segment go further than the record. The host tells viewers that a gold American Eagle is "probably coming out of an illegal Colombian gold mine." The reporting shows that the Mint's supply is partly foreign and that it cannot verify where its gold originated, not that most coins contain cartel gold. And several details the video reads out, including that the Times spent five years on the story and that some mines sit inside bases held by armed groups, come from a secondary summary by the site BigGo Finance that we could not trace back to the Times itself. The video also reads a line from a mining.com.au article saying Washington has not cut off foreign gold because doing so "could make it impossible to meet demand"; that article is no longer online, and we could not find who originally said it.
The video's facts about Norway are accurate: the 66,860 coins, the swerving van, the 2019 seizure of 79,500 coins, the three sentences, the charges dropped against five other suspects, and the prosecutor's statement that "money laundering carries strict sentences." It leaves out the two acquitted Britons. Where it goes wrong is the Mint. The host describes the coins as "connected to an entirely different multi-million dollar criminal investigation with the US Mint" and says the Mint has "some explaining to do," asking how the launderers came to hold so many of its coins. We checked the AP report, Økokrim's statements, NRK's trial coverage, VG's coverage of the verdict, and the U.S. prosecution record as reported by the Justice Department, the IRS and KELOLAND. None of them alleges that the Mint had any role in the fraud or the laundering, and the U.S. record answers the host's question: the fraud ring bought ordinary bullion coins with its victims' money. We have not read the Oslo court's written judgment. The video also says a "new law" now bans shipping legal-tender coins abroad; we found no such new rule, though postal services in the U.S. and Canada have long restricted mailing coins and currency. The gold question is about how the Mint buys raw metal, and it has no connection to the Norway coins, which the fraud ring bought years earlier.
Sources: Associated Press, "A tip about a swerving van leads police to 66,000 US silver coins in a fraud case," September 17, 2026; VG, "Tre dømt etter sølvmynt-funn i vinglete varebil på E18," September 17, 2026; Økokrim, "Silver coins worth NOK 25 million recovered," December 1, 2025, and "Trio handed prison sentences for aggravated laundering of silver coins," September 18, 2026; NRK, "Kobler sølvfunn på E18 til forsvunnet amish-skatt," May 19, 2026; U.S. Attorney's Office, District of South Dakota, releases on the Peachey, Winer and Burkute sentencings (2022); Latvian Public Broadcasting (LSM) on the Burkute charges; KELOLAND, "Pallets of silver coins seized in international fraud case tied to South Dakota," December 7, 2021; mining.com.au, "NYT investigation: Cartel gold found in US Mint supply chain"; Numismatic News, "The U.S. Mint Supply Chain Faces Scrutiny," updated May 5, 2026; ANA Reading Room, "Drug Cartel Gold Found in the U.S. Mint," April 30, 2026; U.S. State Department, "Terrorist Designations of Clan del Golfo," December 2025; Senate Finance Committee letter to Treasury Secretary Bessent, May 14, 2026; Senate Banking Committee minority, Warren and Wyden on the 24-karat Trump coin; BigGo Finance, "America's 'Domestic Gold' Myth Shattered"; Silver Slayer, "The U.S. Mint's NEW Silver Scandal Is Insane," YouTube, September 22, 2026, transcript read September 23. Norway's prosecutor has tied the coins to a 2019 U.S. case involving a former Amish pastor; identifying that case as the South Dakota prosecution of Nathan Peachey and John Winer is Profoundd's own reading of the public record.