If Your Bullion Delivery Is Lost or Stolen: Who Pays, and What Voids the Cover

Nobody wants to ask this before spending five figures on metal, but everybody thinks it: what happens if it doesn't turn up?

Most bullion sites answer with the word “insured” and move on. That word is doing a lot of unexamined work. Insured by whom, against what, up to what value, and — the part that decides everything — who owns the parcel while it is in the van?

Here is how it actually works, what voids cover, and what to do in the first hour if a delivery goes wrong.

The question that matters: when does risk pass to you?

With a reputable dealer, the metal remains the dealer's risk until it is delivered to you and signed for. If it is lost or stolen in transit, that is the dealer's loss to absorb and the dealer's claim to make — not yours.

This is the single most important line in any bullion dealer's terms, and it is worth finding before you order. There are two models:

• Risk passes on delivery. The dealer owns the parcel until it reaches you. A loss in transit is their problem. This is the model any serious dealer should be using, and it is the one we use — risk passes to you only on confirmed delivery.
• Risk passes on despatch. The moment it leaves the vault it is legally yours, and a loss in transit is your problem. Read the terms carefully if a dealer is vague here.

If a site will not tell you plainly which model applies, that is your answer.

Carrier liability is not insurance

Standard courier liability for a lost parcel is a small default figure — typically tens or low hundreds of pounds or dollars — nowhere near the value of bullion. Couriers also almost universally exclude precious metals, cash and jewellery from standard cover entirely.

So the meaningful protection is not the courier's liability at all. It is a separate specie or transit policy that the dealer carries, underwritten by an insurer that handles valuables, covering the full replacement value of what is in the box. That policy is what actually pays.

This is also why bullion does not travel by ordinary parcel service. It moves by registered, insured, signature-required services — and for larger consignments, by specialist secure logistics operators built for this cargo.

What voids cover — read this part twice

Transit insurance is generous about theft and loss, and unforgiving about anything that looks like you gave the parcel away. The most common ways people accidentally void their own protection:

1. A “safe place” instruction. Telling the courier to leave it in a porch, behind a bin, or in a shed removes the signature that the whole policy rests on. Almost every claim of this type is refused, and the courier's app makes it dangerously easy to do.
2. Leaving it with a neighbour. Same problem. Cover normally requires delivery to the named addressee at the named address.
3. Signing for a visibly damaged parcel without noting it. A clean signature is you confirming it arrived intact. If the packaging is torn, opened, re-taped or lighter than it should be, write “damaged” or “received unexamined” on the device before you sign — or refuse it.
4. Redirecting mid-transit. Changing the delivery address after despatch usually breaks the chain of custody the policy assumes.
5. Waiting to report it. Claim windows are short. Report suspected non-delivery or tampering the same day, not next week.

None of these are exotic. Every one of them is a normal convenience that becomes an expensive mistake when the box holds a kilo of gold.

What good practice looks like on our side

• Plain packaging. No dealer name, no metal, no branding, nothing on the label that describes the contents. A box marked with a bullion company's logo is an advertisement to everyone who handles it.
• Signature required, always. No exceptions, no safe-place option.
• Full-value transit cover from despatch to confirmed delivery.
• Tracked throughout, with the tracking sent to you, not just held internally.
• Discreet correspondence. Nothing on the outside of any envelope that says what you buy.

Some of this is covered in more detail in our guide to discreet bullion shipping, and the full terms are on our shipping page.

What to do in the first hour if something is wrong

If the parcel hasn't arrived

1. Check the tracking for a delivery scan. A scan with no parcel is a different problem from no scan at all.
2. If it shows delivered and it isn't there, do not wait 24 hours to “see if it turns up.” Contact us immediately — the claim clock has already started.
3. Ask the courier for the signature image and the GPS coordinates of the delivery scan. Both exist, and both are routinely decisive.

If it arrived damaged or looks tampered with

1. Photograph it before you open it. All six sides, the label, and any damage. This is the evidence.
2. Note the damage on the courier's device, or refuse delivery outright.
3. Open it on camera if you can. A continuous video from sealed box to contents settles almost any dispute.
4. Contact us the same day.

That photograph step sounds fussy. It takes forty seconds and it is the difference between a claim that pays and a claim that becomes an argument.

Once it's delivered, the risk changes shape

The moment you sign, transit cover ends and the question becomes storage. Your home contents policy very likely does not cover bullion by default — most cap valuables at a modest single-article limit and many exclude it outright as cash-equivalent. That is a separate decision, and we walk through the cost of each option in gold bullion storage: what it costs and what's actually insured.

Worth planning before the parcel arrives rather than after.

Why this matters more as prices rise

At the gold price on our live feed as this was written — $4,504.10 per troy ounce — a single kilo bar carries about $144,800 of metal. One box. One signature. One delivery attempt.

That concentration is exactly why the boring questions — who bears the risk, what voids the cover, what you do in the first hour — matter far more than they did when the same bar was worth a third as much. It is also a fair argument for taking a larger position as several 1 oz coins across more than one delivery, rather than one irreplaceable parcel.

The short version

Buy from a dealer who bears the risk until delivery and says so in writing. Never authorise a safe-place drop. Never sign clean for a damaged box. Photograph anything that looks wrong before opening it. Report the same day.

Do those five things and the failure mode everyone quietly worries about becomes an administrative inconvenience rather than a loss. If you have a question about how a specific order will travel, ask us before you place it — we would far rather answer it up front.