17-02-2012, 10:09 PM
What synergy...you two beat me to it!
Brother, Can You Spare $6 Trillion?
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: February 17, 2012
ROME Italian police on Friday arrested eight people on charges related to the seizure of $6 trillion in fake United States Treasury bonds, in a mysterious scam that stretched from Hong Kong to Switzerland to the southern Italian region of Basilicata.
The value of the seized bonds is in the neighborhood of half of the entire United States public debt of $15.36 trillion, but they were never intended to be passed off as real securities. Rather than counterfeit, they were what law enforcement officials call fictitious, printed in 6,000 units of $1 billion each a unit that does not exist the bond equivalent of $3 bills, American officials said.
In a statement on Friday, the United States embassy in Rome said its experts had examined the bonds, which were dated 1934, and determined they were fictitious and allegedly part of a scam intended to defraud Swiss banks. There is no evidence the bonds were ever used for that purpose.
Italian police arrested eight people across Italy on Friday on fraud and related charges as part of a broader investigation into organized crime in the southern Basilicata region, the instep of Italy's boot, prosecutors in Potenza said in an e-mailed statement.
They said they had found the bonds along with a fake copy of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by European powers at the end of the First World War in special compartments in metal crates in a Swiss vault, which Swiss authorities had sent them last fall following a request for cooperation.
"We had heard that they weighed a lot, but frankly we didn't expect to find that kind of material," Giovanni Colangelo, the chief prosecutor of Potenza, said in a telephone interview on Friday.
He said that prosecutors had heard about the fake bonds after picking up chatter in wiretapped phone conversations. In 2010, authorities in the Lazio region seized four fake bonds, each printed with the value of $500 million, but he said the mother lode was found in the vaults moved from Switzerland last fall.
One of the eight men arrested had moved the $6 trillion in fictitious bonds from Hong Kong to a Swiss deposit in 2006, Mr. Colangelo said. He said the origins of the bonds was unknown, but added that authorities had also seized a fake will, allegedly part of a scam in which a suspect would claim to have inherited the bonds and try to use them to open up credit lines at a bank.
Prosecutors said they had also picked up wiretapped phone conversations in which the suspects talked about buying plutonium from Nigerian sources. They did not provide further details, but Mr. Colangelo said their efforts did not come to fruition
In the statement, Potenza prosecutors said that the false bonds "posed concrete and grave dangers for the stability of the international credit system."
But American officials said the phony bonds were fairly routine. "This is just a scam, very frequent, very common," said Brian Leary, a spokesman for the United States Secret Service. "Our agents provided Italian authorities with expertise that these notes are fictitious instruments, as we refer to them, which are commonly used as collateral, say for a loan."
According to the Federal Reserve, such scams, known as fictitious instrument fraud, are increasingly common and have victimized unwitting investors to the tune of nearly $10 billion in recent years.
In a common ploy, "criminals present fictitious financial instruments such as Federal Reserve notes, standby letters of credit, prime bank guarantees, or prime bank notes in order to fraudulently collateralize loans," the Federal Reserve says on its Web site.
In 2009, Italian police seized phony United States Treasury bonds with a face value of $250 million.
Brother, Can You Spare $6 Trillion?
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: February 17, 2012
ROME Italian police on Friday arrested eight people on charges related to the seizure of $6 trillion in fake United States Treasury bonds, in a mysterious scam that stretched from Hong Kong to Switzerland to the southern Italian region of Basilicata.
The value of the seized bonds is in the neighborhood of half of the entire United States public debt of $15.36 trillion, but they were never intended to be passed off as real securities. Rather than counterfeit, they were what law enforcement officials call fictitious, printed in 6,000 units of $1 billion each a unit that does not exist the bond equivalent of $3 bills, American officials said.
In a statement on Friday, the United States embassy in Rome said its experts had examined the bonds, which were dated 1934, and determined they were fictitious and allegedly part of a scam intended to defraud Swiss banks. There is no evidence the bonds were ever used for that purpose.
Italian police arrested eight people across Italy on Friday on fraud and related charges as part of a broader investigation into organized crime in the southern Basilicata region, the instep of Italy's boot, prosecutors in Potenza said in an e-mailed statement.
They said they had found the bonds along with a fake copy of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by European powers at the end of the First World War in special compartments in metal crates in a Swiss vault, which Swiss authorities had sent them last fall following a request for cooperation.
"We had heard that they weighed a lot, but frankly we didn't expect to find that kind of material," Giovanni Colangelo, the chief prosecutor of Potenza, said in a telephone interview on Friday.
He said that prosecutors had heard about the fake bonds after picking up chatter in wiretapped phone conversations. In 2010, authorities in the Lazio region seized four fake bonds, each printed with the value of $500 million, but he said the mother lode was found in the vaults moved from Switzerland last fall.
One of the eight men arrested had moved the $6 trillion in fictitious bonds from Hong Kong to a Swiss deposit in 2006, Mr. Colangelo said. He said the origins of the bonds was unknown, but added that authorities had also seized a fake will, allegedly part of a scam in which a suspect would claim to have inherited the bonds and try to use them to open up credit lines at a bank.
Prosecutors said they had also picked up wiretapped phone conversations in which the suspects talked about buying plutonium from Nigerian sources. They did not provide further details, but Mr. Colangelo said their efforts did not come to fruition
In the statement, Potenza prosecutors said that the false bonds "posed concrete and grave dangers for the stability of the international credit system."
But American officials said the phony bonds were fairly routine. "This is just a scam, very frequent, very common," said Brian Leary, a spokesman for the United States Secret Service. "Our agents provided Italian authorities with expertise that these notes are fictitious instruments, as we refer to them, which are commonly used as collateral, say for a loan."
According to the Federal Reserve, such scams, known as fictitious instrument fraud, are increasingly common and have victimized unwitting investors to the tune of nearly $10 billion in recent years.
In a common ploy, "criminals present fictitious financial instruments such as Federal Reserve notes, standby letters of credit, prime bank guarantees, or prime bank notes in order to fraudulently collateralize loans," the Federal Reserve says on its Web site.
In 2009, Italian police seized phony United States Treasury bonds with a face value of $250 million.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass