"Brother, Can You Spare $6 Trillion?" On Friday Italian police arrested eight people on charges which were related to the seizure of $6 trillion in fake United States Treasury bonds, in a strange scheme that stretched from Hong Kong to Switzerland to the southern Italian region of Basilicata. The value of these seized bonds is about half of the United States’ entire public debt of $15.36 trillion.
Officials have called these securities fictitious instead of counterfeit. They were printed in 6,000 units of $1 billion each, which is a denomination that does not exist. The prosecutors have said they had found the bonds, along with a fake copy of the Treaty of Versailles, supposedly signed by European powers at the end of World War I, in special compartments in metal crates in a Swiss vault.
The Federal Reserve, has said such “fictitious instrument fraud” is increasingly common, and that unwitting investors have been cheated of almost $10 billion in recent years. The Federal Reserve has gone on to say this is a common ploy wherein “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.” So you have to be very careful when presented with such securities because clearly the scope of such sophisticated scams is international.
Photographer: digitalart
