Written By Justin Zzyzx and Brandy Naugle for FakeMinerals.com

Investigative Reporting by Hal Guyot

Arkansas is known for something very unique.

The ONLY public access diamond mine in the entire world. For a small fee, anyone can go to the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro Arkansas and search for diamonds in the giant open dirt field.

While it is certainly no easy task to unearth a diamond here, amazing finds have been reported and tracked through time. The average diamond found at the “Crater” is far less than a carat, most weighing in at under 10 points (that’s 1/10th of a carat) (TINY!). Finding a nice big fat stone over a carat is something people work for years and don’t find!

Diamonds at the Crater come in several shades, 70% of them being white, with brown coming in second and yellow is a close third.

The state park registers all of the diamonds that people find at the park, if they are willing to register it. Some don’t because they want to keep it private, while many want the nifty card that you get when you register your diamond with the park. They even keep track of everyone’s finds on their website, www.craterofdiamondsstatepark.com.

Diamonds from Arkansas are also special because of a very important fact. They are worth some SERIOUS dollars! They are so special and unique, plus they tend to be among the hardest diamonds known to man. They have a unique form and often look like sleek drops of glass, rather than crude cubes and rough diamonds of so many African locations. So, an Arkansas diamond is going to be one of the most expensive diamonds you can get, but rightfully so!

Now that you know all about the important facts about diamonds from the “Crater of Diamonds State Park”, learn about how someone almost came up with a perfect scam. Almost.

You certainly couldn’t take any diamond into the park and plant it on the ground. Or at least no one thought you could. A diamond from Africa, Brazil, Russia, et al. would not produce diamonds that look like the ones from Arkansas. But someone found a source that could pass for Arkansas diamonds. A source in India that imports diamonds from the Panna Mines.

Photos of diamond lots sent to Eric to examine prior to purchase.

India produces hundreds of thousands more diamonds than the US, therefore, the diamonds from India are much cheaper than their American counterparts. A man named Eric Blake (www.arkansasdiamondjewelry.com) figured out he could make some money by purchasing diamonds from India then take them into the park and “find” them. A brown diamond from India costs around $100 per carat, while a similar diamond from Arkansas costs $1000 -$2000 per carat. A profit of more than 1000%.

In late October of 2007, Eric Blake and his family took a trip to the “Crater” and found an amazing amount of LARGE BROWN DIAMONDS!

It was no coincidence that he also placed a rush order for an assortment of Indian diamonds to be delivered no later than October 18th.

On 10/6/07 Eric sent the following message from his girlfriend (and accomplice) Susan Gabrielson’s email account.

Hello (Name Withheld),I may have deleted your last mail by accident. As I have not gotten a response from you. We are eagerly awaiting your mail. The stones must be received no later than October 18, 2007. Anything you can do to expedite this shipment would be greatly appreciated.

Over the span of 5 days, Eric and his three assistants “found” over 16.5 carats of diamonds at the park, including a whopping 3.92 carat stone! What great luck, eh? Out of all of the recorded finds they had that week, 60% of them were brown! What an interesting thing, because usually only around 20% of the finds are brown in color.

Screen captures of from the park diamond find archive for Eric Blake, Susan Gabrielson, Sarah Gabrielson, & Sayde Gabrielson

Eric also owns a website called ArkansasDiamondJewelry.com which sells diamonds and jewelry, reported to come from the “Crater” complete with certificate of authenticity issued by the Arkansas State Park. However, some of the diamonds on the site are proven to be Indian in origin. FakeMinerals.com received paperwork which shows Eric Blake importing diamonds from India in early October.

Kimberly Certificate

UPS Tracking code, screen captured from UPS.com

If that isn’t damning enough, photos taken by the salesperson in India which clearly match up with diamonds for sale on ArkansasDiamondJewelry.com

In addition, Eric sells “Arkansas Diamonds” on eBay (sayde1garcia) and has successfully sold some of his Indian diamonds to mineral dealers here in America as originating from Arkansas.

Private sources have indicated that they have been onto Mr. Blake for a few months now, but they have lacked the evidence to be sure that he was “salting” the diamond field.

One regular digger at the “Crater” met Mr. Blake in 2006 when he first tried out his scam. At that time he only registered a few diamonds. Mr. Blake offered to let the regular digger search his hole when he was done. It wasn’t much surprise that the regular didn’t find anything else in that hole. In 2007 Mr. Blake and his family were digging in an area that is known to be the dumping ground for gravel that was trucked in 1924 to put in a road. This gravel is completely free from diamonds as it is not from the diamond field, however they found a remarkable 32 diamonds! Mr. Blake then offered the hole to another family when they were leaving and while the family moved quite a bit of material, no more diamonds were forthcoming.

Mr. Blake. The diggers at the “Crater of Diamonds State Park” would like you to know that you are persona non grata.

With this information MOST, IF NOT ALL of the Diamonds sold by Mr. Blake are not from Arkansas and should be labeled as coming from the Panna Mine in India.

It is amazing that someone could think they would get away with trying to scam these finds, especially since there are dozens of people who stare, poke and prod at the numbers of the finds on the Crater’s website. 32 diamonds is an impossible number of diamonds to be found by two adults and two children during 5 days at the park.

Additionaly, As recently as January 2008, Eric has sent emails trying to “match” certain stones. And while there is nothing wrong with that in itself, in this context, it is more than a little suspicious.

I leave you with this parting thought… What is the Travel Channel’s most promoted collecting location on their “Best Places to find Cash and Treasures” series? Yep, you guessed it! Crater of Diamonds State Park! Could this be the beginning of the inevitable backlash associated with promoting this “get rich quick” mentality to mineral collecting? I guess only time will tell.

Fake Minerals and Scams are all around us. If you catch wind of something fishy, send to us here at Justin@the-vug.com

Thanks again to Hal Guyot (GeoSleuth@gmail.com) for all your hard work on this story!

Special Extra Thanks goes out to the HONEST INDIAN DEALER, Malay Hirani of Soni Tools (www.sonitools.com) for being willing to help stop fraud!

UPDATE!: Just google Eric Blake’s name on Google and you will find AP News report after AP News report about his 3.92 carat stone find in October of 2007. Not only did he scam the public, the state park, but he also scamed the media. What a guy!

UPDATE!: As soon as Eric heard about this website, he removed the photos that match up above and got rid of his “Dealer Lot” section, well, those diamonds matched up perfectly!

UPDATE!: There is a ton of additional extra evidence and it has all been turned into the authorities. We do not know if anyone will ever see that this out to justice, but you can be sure that far and wide, people know what to look out for and a scammer has been chased out!

And here is a picture found on Google of Eric Blake holding his “famous find”.

A reader alerted me to something I had seen before in the past I thought was odd. (Thanks Tim!)

So, when I went back and checked again, I was suprised to see this still in print.

The website SunSpar.com sells faceted translucent Labradorite, otherwise known as Sunstone when it has a schiller effect to it.

The faceted Gem grade yellow Labradorite is very real, however without sparkling inclusions, it should not be called Sunstone, which it is several times on their website.

In addition, the supply of large chunks of facet grade Labradorite are not in any kind of short supply. Quite the contrary, I know one of the owners of a very large Mexican Labradorite mine and from first hand knowledge, the supply of top notch gem grade Labradorite is not running low and it has not for the last twenty years.

While the website states that the information they are giving you in their sales pitch is “In the opinon of their manager”, blatent misinformation is a lie. I contacted the company via phone call to ask them if they stood by their story after I told them the information I had, I was abruptly hung up on. Apparently they have no comment on this.

Here is a photo of their website from the WAYBACKMACHINE, circa Feb. 1998. Below that, a picture of their site from today, March 26th, 2008.

70% off! I guess that site didn’t do a super great job convincing that yellow Labradorite was some crazy rare gem, never before known to mankind.

Here is an auction for a Marcasite specimen from England, around $4.00 US.

Certainly nothing wrong with that specimen above. However, let’s take a peek at this auction, with a very similar looking specimen…

This auction has a Marcasite from the same location as the one above it, is only SLIGHTLY bigger (4mm) and is $70.00 more! I believe that it is certainly a nicer specimen but one could postulate that the much higher starting price is certainly due to the target audience it is being sold to. The cheaper one is being sold to the mineral collector market, people who collect minerals for whatever reason. The second one is marketed to the Metaphysical community, people who believe that minerals will have some kind of miraculous effect to them. If anyone tries to sell you something because it will DO something for you, shop around to make sure you are not buying something fairly common for a much higher premium.

Thanks to reader David B. for sending in that one! Feel free to e-mail me at Justin@the-vug.com to submit photos and links!

A while ago I wrote about the program on the Travel Channel, “Best Places to Find Cash and Treasures”. The program has the following premise…Host guides viewers to a region of America to search out minerals, gems, and other collectable items. The host then takes the items found and has them cut, polished and sometimes set into jewelry, then appraised to be sold. Sometimes even sold on the show.

I had problems not so much with the basic premise of the program. There is certainly nothing wrong with promoting mineral collecting. Selling your finds usually doesn’t accompany a mineral collecting trip, because sometimes a mineral collecting trip is a very non-productive event. Usually, if you find something really incredible, you keep it. It gets sold when you either die or need money for your kid’s heart transplant. Even the most bloodthristy field collectors who collect to sell keep the best stuff for their collections. They program doesn’t even touch on this kind of collecting/selling aspect…no, everything is done as GREED as the main factor.

The host of the second season of this program, Becky Whorley, was pretty $$$ focused. However, as an hour long program, she did have a fun attitude and seemed to be really interested in why things were formed and found. The new host is ONLY concered about $$$$ and now that it is only a half hour long, the greed seems to fill the entire episode. Mineral collecting is a fun hobby, but what fun is it when GREED is the main motivating factor!?!

Watch the show, on the Travel Channel. Count how many dollar signs you see in the show. Watch out for the SALTED tailing piles, the SALTED finds, the horrible safety violations and the general poor job of representing our hobby.

Smoky Quartz. One of the items that used to be faked was Smoky Quartz. But all the NATURAL Smoky Quartz has really made faking it kind of pointless.

Well, in Romania, the regular Quartz isn’t good enough…see this natural colored one below.

But this. This is no good. The Quartz has been treated with radioactivity to make the color like this. No good.

I have been looking for awhile for a really good fake Malachite Stalactite specimen on eBay to show you, however, I haven’t seen any on eBay in a long time. A good thing too!

But Mike from Geological Desires showed me a fantastic fake specimen…

What they do is take some powdered Malachite and spray it onto some plasterized Malachite Stalactite base. When you hit it with the UV light you can see all the glue glowing bright yellow/orange in the background.

So, when you see a Malachite Stalactite specimen, check it out for the powdered Malachite surface and check it out with a UV light first to see if the glue stands out!

Azeztulite

It is not the name of a mineral, but rather the TRADEMARKED made up name used to scam people all over the world into paying rediculous prices for a material that makes up 12% of the entire earth’s crust!

That’s right…Azeztulite is Quartz. Plain, ordinary Quartz. Get this, the material sold by the company that coined the name is Quartz that you couldn’t normally even give away. Stuff that people don’t even pick up when they are out mineral collecting.

It is truly horrible. The company who started the scam are hitting multiple people! First off, the people who are buying it directly from them. You can be sure that a large amount of these first level sales are to people who fancy themselves eBay dealers and metaphysical store owners. Then, the prices are raised even higher (and the original company already sells the stuff for asine prices) and the items are moved on down the line to the metaphysical buyer. By this time, the price of a clear faceted Quartz in a simple setting will set you back around $70.00. Well, the same faceted Quartz in a simple setting will cost you no more than $10.00 from most dealers, less than half that when buying in bulk. So, the first company buys these things for around $5.00;sells them to some unknowledgeable eBay dealer for $35.00 and poor ol’ you shells out $70.00 for this thing.

It gets worse now…

Dealers who are smarter than the metaphysical dealers have found that there are plenty of people with more money than smarts and started selling plain polished Quartz from Brazil as Azeztulite. Simple Quartz that might sell for around $15-$20 will sell for nearly three times that amount when sold as Azeztulite! They are selling material by the Kilo, by the TON!

Well, we have established just what Azeztulite is…plain ol’ simple common Quartz.
We have also showed you just why the name was created to bump the prices of this worthless item into a very profitable item.

I need to explain why they came up with the name Azeztulite. Well, the company that came up with this colorful myth state that this material was named as such after contact with the alien race of “Azez”. The material is commonly said to come from North Carolina and Vermont. Well, guess what? There is not a single country in the world that doesn’t have Quartz; save for maybe Malta and Nauru. Vatican City anyone?

But why, how and when did them come up with this foolishness?

There were multiple sources of information I gathered over the past few years which led up to the formation of Azeztulite.

The first one was a comical story, involving a field collector who was prospecting out in the far northwest part of America. He found some small clear shards of material he believed to be Phenakite. Well, nobody buys Phenakite shards except for Metaphysical dealers, so he took these shards of mineral to one of the largest metaphysical selling outfits. Well, they bought the material from this field collector as Phenakite and started selling the material as such. After a couple months our inquisitve field collector gets the results back from the lab that tested this material – it turned out to be a clear feldspar. So he contacted Nirvana and Terra and told them of the mistake. Well, what did they do about all that Feldspar sold as Phenakite?

In a completely different setting I was chatting with one of my Metaphysical dealer friends and educating her on some of the fake junk she was buying, like colored glass as Obsidian and white moldavite. She then told me about this Phenakite she had bought from this company that was not actually Phenakite but a brand new mineral called Azeztulite! She was so excited that she got such a great deal…Azeztulite for the price of Phenakite shards (Sold by the gram no less) She immediatly wanted to order more of it. She gave me a sample of this material to keep and a few months later she gave me a piece of Azeztulite from her new shipment. The first piece she gave me;clear feldspar. The second piece;broken Quartz.

Is it possible that a company could take this faux pau and turn it into something that would make them a small fortune?

Click on some of these pictures to get a great overview of the fraud that is Azeztulite…

Below here check out these “Azeztulite” angels! They would sell for no more than $24.00 for the pair, retail, if you were lucky. But this person wants $140.00 for the pair…because…you know…they are “Azeztulite”!

How much is this worth as Quartz? Maybe $20.00…max!

Here is my buddy Crystalline Rainbow, showing the REAL DEAL material, from Robert Simmons, owner of some company called Heaven and Earth…

Unfortunatly, I don’t think Rob get’s a cut out of these sales…just some chump jumping on the Azeztulite bandwagon!

Oh, and just in case we ever run out of junk quartz from Vermont and North Carolina…and the millions of tons of Indian and Brazilian Quartz sold as such…well, here is a “new” find of Quartz!…er…I mean…Azeztulite! Woot!

And…ps…Azeztulite.com…now that’s funny!

Hello everyone!

It has been a long time since we put a new post on FakeMinerals.com!
Sorry for the delay, but we have been on the road, filming for our mineral collecting video series! We have been to over 130 sites in just 3 months, plus we will be going to over 50 more in the next coming 2 months! That’s a lot of rocks!

While we were visiting the Collector’s Edge in Golden Colorado we got the chance to see their many flats of FAKE MINERALS that they had pulled out of collections over the years.

Here are some pictures of fake minerals from their collection…can you spot the fakeness?

Here are all three of the minerals…

Quartz with Garnets…

Cerussite with Malachite

Calcite on Basalt from India

Well, the Garnets are glued on and surrounded by some glued on mica, used to hide the glue marks!

The Cerussite is glued on as well, surrounded by a dusting of Malachite around the glued edges!

The Calcite was cut off and glued onto the matrix.

But all three of them look normal, don’t they?