Friday's release of the movie Gold is stirring painful memories for Albertans who sunk their savings into the investment scandal that inspired the Hollywood drama.

Two decades ago, in 1996, Calgary-based mining company Bre-X claimed an unprecedented gold find in Indonesia and collected thousands of investments.

In 1997, an independent assessment concluded the gold didn't exist. Someone had "salted" the drilling results by adding gold dust to the rock before it reached a testing laboratory.

Margaret Helen and her late husband Bill lost $45,000 when Bre-X shut down that year.

This weekend, the 81-year-old — who asked not to share her last name because of a recent identity theft — shuffled through her Bre-X investment papers for the first time in 20 years.

Margaret Helen and her late husband made several investments and lost thousands of dollars to the Bre-X scandal. (Zoe Todd/CBC)

"My husband kept some records here and it says, 'Why do you buy Bre-X shares?' And he says, 'Because of news in financial markets that this was the world's biggest find of gold. The stock broker told us that this stock would do well and that we could not lose,'" Helen reads from the document.

She pauses, looks up and swallows dryly.

"Not true. We lost everything."

Her husband was sick with cancer at the time, Helen said. The couple invested in Bre-X with the hope of bolstering their retirement fund in case he couldn't work again.

"It sounded so good," she said. "Everyone was in on it."

Looking back, Helen said she wishes they hadn't followed along.

"We would have had that extra money to pursue more medical help for him. That's the way I look at it," she said.

Her husband died one year after the scandal broke.

Worldwide, investors lost an estimated $3 billion.

Bre-X shareholders are shocked to learn that there may be no gold in the Indonesian deposits that made company stock soar. 2:43

A prolonged court battle ended in 2013 with a $5.2 million settlement divided between investors who joined a class-action lawsuit.

The founding members of Bre-X were not convicted and two of them have since died.

Helen said she never saw a cent of her investment returned.

"We bought into it with good faith and how they got away with it I'll never know," she said. "But they sure shouldn't have. They should have been doing jail time."

@ZoeHTodd