2 Japanese carrying $134 bil worth of U.S. bonds detained in Italy

[David Guyatt]

Via a poster on Karl Denninger's Market Ticker site:

1934 MORGENTHAU TREASURY BONDS
A problem that has been most prevalent in the Far East recently surfaced in London when officers from the City of London Fraud Squad seized fake $US Treasury Bonds with a nominal value in excess of $2.5 trillion.

On the first occasion $2.5 trillion worth of these bonds was seized from a safe keeping vault of a bank in the City of London in an assortment of 44 boxes, files and envelopes. Among the haul were a number of counterfeit Chinese Railway Bonds dating from the early part of the 1900’s.

Although genuine Chinese Bonds have a collector's value of about £20 each, the faked US Treasury Bonds are well known to the US Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies, in Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada. Attempts have been made by fraudsters to use them as collateral for loans or to obtain money from naïve investors.

On the second occasion a number of people were arrested in the City of London after presenting billions of dollars worth of these bonds to a financial institution attempting to obtain “facilities”. Two women have been charged.

The story usually given by the fraudsters is that these bonds were printed by the CIA and given to Chiang Kai Sheck who opposed Chinese Communism in the 1930’s. However, so the story goes, some were lost and were then found in caves/crashed aircraft/sunken submarines (take your pick) by illiterate natives who passed them on to city slickers in exchange for a few trinkets. The fraudsters have even attached details of a B17 bomber, its tail number and details of the crew which perished in a crash in the rainforests of some distant tropical island.

Investors in the Far East have parted with huge sums of money to buy these bonds at 1¢ in the dollar. In June 2001 a US resident shot his wife and two children then turned the gun on himself after finding that these bonds, which he tried to encash at the US Bureau of Public Debt, were complete fakes.

Invariably the bonds are contained in what looks like a metal box with a serial number and a key number. The seal of the United States is usually embossed on to box lid. Once opened, the box will contain the bonds (which have a peculiar creosote aroma), sometimes large and heavy yellow metal coins in denominations of anything from $100m - $1bn, a negative film roll and a supporting documents such as an international certificate of immunity.

Although the Treasury Bonds are well presented, the fraudsters did not realise that the various Federal Reserve Banks have codes attached to them as follows:-

Boston: A; 1 Richmond: E; 5 Minneapolis: I; 9
New York City: B; 2 Atlanta: F; 6 Kansas City: J; 10
Philadelphia: C; 3 Chicago: G; 7 Dallas: K; 11
Cleveland: D; 4 St. Louis: H; 8 San Francisco: L; 12

Some of the treasury notes have the incorrect seal code for the Federal Reserve Bank purporting to have issued the note. How did this happen? Quite simply, the fraudsters cut and pasted images of current $US currency into the bonds and they didn’t look too closely or they didn’t understand what the codes meant. On occasion, if you know where to look, you can see the remnants of the currency that they have tried to hide or cut in the process.

If you are presented with documents of this nature, the US Secret Service at the US Embassy would be delighted to hear about it and will assist in any way that they can.

For other examples of this high profile crime please see the following web pages:-

http://web.singnet.com.sg/~twells/news110.htm

http://www.fraud-stoppers.info/alerts/treasury.html

Now why would this nice poster actually make a post about fraudsters using wrong Federal Reserve bank district codes and then post the accurate Fed Reserve banks codes?

Answers on a postcard addressed to the US Department of the Treasury Secret Service please.

Anyway, a nice, clean, authorized version of events the foregoing. Time for a trip down memory lane.

Methinks someone on Denninger's forum has US Treasury connections. I was also interested to note that attention was directed to Tony Wells website (the bottom link) for any number of "apparent" frauds of a similar nature. Which is odd, because a decade and more ago on a blackmarket website since lost to the Klingon empire, I believe I recall seeing a rather large singe diamond of pristine characteristics being offered for sale - ex Philippines by, Lordy, Tony Wells. I believe I even contacted Tony Wells at the time about this but alas, got no answer.

In those days (it was still the heady cybernet wild west days) there were a small number of black market websites around where interested parties could sellor buy, for example, any one of dozens of black market items --- gemstones, quantities of cash for "swapping" from one currency to another (the swap to take place inside a reputable and well known security companies bonded warehouse no less), gold bars ex South African mining companies (a tax dodge obviously), gold dust, silver bars, Colombian cartel emeralds, Russian Mafiya "trinkets", Yeltsin loot --- the list just goes on and on and on. One of the regular more innocent items for sale were shipping container of "Master Cartons" of (for example) Philip Morris and Red Morlboro fags available Free on Board at Rotterdam for relative peanuts. Curious, I even phoned BAT in London under my journalistic credentials and asked how many cigarettes a "Master Carton" contained. I had no idea of the consternation I would cause, but after a couple of phone discussions I realized that the fag manufacturers were the "guiding minds" behind this black market business.

And concerning the US Bureau of Public Debt referenced by the foregoing poster, there was a fairly senior officer of that entity who inhabited all these "black" boards. He kept some interesting company. Years later he was sacked for taking a bribe.

The fraudsters have even attached details of a B17 bomber, its tail number and details of the crew which perished in a crash in the rainforests of some distant tropical island.

Why not just come out and say the Philippines? After all that's the story that went around and around and around.

The Kennedy Bonds aspect is now almost well and truly lost and forgotten. Which was to be expected, I think. But moi is not going to let it slip away quite so easily. JFK and Sukarnoe were really on quite cordial terms don't you know. JFK got assassinated and then Sukarnoe overthrown, thanks to the CIA's Frank Wisner. And I do have copies of a purported agreement between JFK and Sukarnoe concerning the use of alleged Indonesian gold - that may well have had Philippine and Japanese fingerprints on it. This agreement is one of those that clearly are fake - but which, according to some, represent an echo of a far more secret agreement.

Sukarnoe's daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri (long before she was elected Prime Minister) during a chance meeting at a hotel in Zurich told Peter Johnston that so far as she was aware the "Secret Treaty" certificates were genuine.