Gold­line Inter­na­tion­al, Glenn Beck­’s cor­po­rate BFF and long­time spon­sor, has been ordered by a San­ta Mon­i­ca court to refund $4.5 mil­lion to cus­tomers, set aside an addi­tion­al $800,000 for future claims, and stop #$@ telling the rubes that the gov­ern­men­t’s com­ing for their gold:

Beck, for his part, lav­ish­ly praised the com­pa­ny, telling lis­ten­ers and view­ers that he per­son­al­ly bought gold from the com­pa­ny and call­ing its exec­u­tives ​“peo­ple I trust.”

Those were the gold­en days. Since Beck­’s Fox News hey­day, his for­tunes and Gold­line’s have fall­en sharply. Beck part­ed ways with Fox in June, and in Novem­ber pros­e­cu­tors in San­ta Mon­i­ca charged six of Gold­line’s exec­u­tives with fraud and accused the com­pa­ny of run­ning a bait-and-switch oper­a­tion that lured cus­tomers into buy­ing over­priced antique coins as invest­ments — coins that Beck pro­mot­ed on his shows. Moth­er Jones doc­u­ment­ed this scam in a 2010 sto­ry about the com­pa­ny and its rela­tion­ship with Beck. The for­mer New York con­gress­man Antho­ny Wein­er helped bring nation­al atten­tion to the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness prac­tices. Beck went on the defen­sive, attack­ing Wein­er and defend­ing his favorite gold deal­er. [Stephanie Mencimer, Moth­er Jones]