"Gold plated" connectors: how tell which ones are fake?

[Moriambar]

Hi,
it's just a question that popped up in my mind. I have "inherited" some lab equipment, containing banana plugs & similar. Some of them are gold plated, or at least they're gold coloured and shiny.
Is there any non-destructive way to tell whether they really are gold or are some kind of chinese ripoff?

Btw, they're all good to me, I do not need gold plated anything basically, but I wanted to know out of curiosity

[richard.cs]

Generally fake-gold-plated stuff is rare. Most electrical things that look like gold and don't tarnish horribly in a few weeks really are gold. What varies is the quality and thickness of the plating. Cheap items are likely to have a very thin layer of gold, with minimum prep. It might have surface imperfections and in extreme cases flake off. Proper gold plated items will not just have thicker gold but will have a series of layers of different metals with chemical cleaning steps in between.

[tooki]

I got some Chinese “gold plated” headers that are basically unsolderable. I had to throw them out.

I think fake gold plating isn’t as rare as you think.