Lost Golden Game Boy Advance

Wow, it's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except we're looking for the prizes themselves.

Niiiice

Actually, I take that back.

I agree, and nintendo always puts love and care into packages(it's the Japanese way)
.From Nintendo's history, they would of sent them nice original gb advanced sp boxes. 1 becuse you need manuals and all that jazz and you can re use inserts.
If anything it came with a nice little proof of aunthinisity. Nintendo does that with EVERYTHING!...

Yea, no. If you transfer these prices into anything more common, you realize that 850,000 Indonesian whatevers looks like a pretty impressive number, but basically it's only around 60 Euros or 65 US Dollars. And that's actually a good price for a gold plated GBA SP. I guess many people don't get that gold plated doesn't mean you have a lot of gold. The gold layer is as thin as a hair, and since it has become pretty common to use gold foil to decorate food you can buy it pretty cheaply, even at amazon.com or ebay. The 24 carat gold foil needed to gold plate a GBA SP costs around 10 Euros.
And even the test that guy from the spanish forum has done (or better, a gold seller has done for him) doesn't say much. As I wrote, the gold foil costs around 10 Euros, so gold plating a GBA SP in 24k isn't as expensive as it sounds.

I am actually pretty surprised that not more of these have surfaced on ebay so far. They are easy and cheap to fake, the winners' history and therefore potential previous owners are unknown ("My cousin in the UK bought this from a collector whose little brother's best friend won it...") and those sold so far sold for insane prices, even without any proof of authenticity.

More likely than not, not all units were sold - being that this was around the time the DS launched, I wouldn't be surprised if none of the tickets were found.

I would call that spanish guy fake, simply because his story of him having the gold plating tested for real gold doesn't check out. Such a test would leave visible scratches on the surface, because you rub some of the gold plating off and use an acid to determine whether it is gold or not and what carat this gold has.

Again, the problem is that it is absolutely impossible to tell if it is a fake or not. There is only one advertising picture of the real gold plated GBA SP, and that one doesn't really show many details.

It may have black buttons, the shoulder buttons may or may not be gold plated (hard to see, may be a reflection in the gold) and the hinge covers may or may not be black (again, possible reflection in the gold plating). We do not know if there are any Zelda-themed tryforce symbols engraved or whatnot, we don't even know if they are AGS-101 or AGS-001. The AGS-101 was released in 2005, so the seven golden ones could potentially be early AGS-101 models.
Even this picture of the possible real gold plated GBA SP looks different from the one above:

Buttons are grey instead of black, shoulder buttons are grey aswell, the rubber screw covers over and below the screen are missing or black (I tend to say black, but it's hard to tell).

And as I already wrote, gold plating is pretty cheap, so faking one of these gold plated GBA SP isn't really expensive. I personally won't believe anyone who claims he owns one of these 7 golden GBA SP without any proof of authenticity.