$6 Trillion In Fake US Treasury Bonds Seized In Switzerland 199
ackthpt writes "If you're going to steal, steal big, right? Italian anti-mafia prosecutors have announced the seizure of $6 trillion of allegedly fake U.S. Treasury bonds, an amount that's almost half of the U.S.'s public debt. The probe focusing upon money laundering has also include financial dealings alleged to direct money to Nigerian sources to buy plutonium. Sound like a movie plot, yet? $6 Trillion, that's a lot of lettuce."
Nobody ever said crooks were that smart (Score:5, Insightful)
Crooks come up with stupid plans all the time, and often let their own greed blind their judgement. Hell look at some of the people who scam the 419 scammers. The 419 scammers are counting on people's greed to overwhelm their good sense, and then fall victim to the same thing.
Indeed such a thing would almost certainly raise eyebrows but the crooks likely didn't think it through.
Re:Photos cast doubt on whether or not they are fa (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, Zero Hedge is going full on truther there (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, that is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've seen. The fact aside all the truther bullshit of "9/11 was an inside job" there's no way the bonds were real on account of the amount. In 1940 the US debt was only about $43 billion dollars (the GDP was only $97 billion). So there weren't $6 trillion of bonds floating around. The debt didn't hit the $6 trillion mark until late 2002 (the GDP was about $10 trillion). However, dates of the bonds aside, the treasury doesn't issue physical notes anymore. They are all just electronic entries in a database. Far more convenient, secure, and trackable.
Might want to lay off the conspiracy sites. Here's a hint: If someone starts going on about 9/11 being an inside job, they are a conspiracy nut.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? This story seems to have hit the press the moment it was discovered, and they all sort of ignored the absurdity of it. It's the guy with a printer argument, only expensive printer and organized mafia, but it was absurd. 10 seconds of internet searches reveals US gpd in 1934 as under 100 billion dollars, so a 1 billion dollar bond is just nonsense. That they printed 6000 of them, which is maybe a few thousand dollars in forgery is hardly that significant.
It doesn't seem like anyone important who saw them took them as actually legitimate. They found them and reported them as a result of some bad cheques (that were to the tune of 200k), and that was the end of it.
Not really an interesting story (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the scale means it was pretty much automatically ineffective. Also the instruments they counterfeited were never real. There are no billion dollar bonds floating around from 1934, and certainly not $6 trillion worth.
Effective counterfeiting requires that you are cloning an instrument that actually exists and people would accept, and that you pass it off in amounts that doesn't raise suspicion.
It's amusing, but it isn't as though these were some supergenius criminal masterminds who came close to making $6 trillion. They are some idiot criminals who had a scam pretty much doomed to fail.
Because forgers are smarter then the average /.er (Score:4, Insightful)
A few years ago two old forgers, father and son, were caught. They did masterful work but their real master stroke was in authenticating the items. How do you proof something is yours and is legit? Well, you shows that you, or rather, someone long death in your family, bought it legit at an auction.
How? They used an old and real auction catalog, pointed to an item description that was similar to the item they had forged and went with a story like my father bought this item here, what do you think it is worth if we wanted to sell it? It worked wonders. The documents were 100% legit and therefor in no doubt, they just weren't related.
If you want to sell these bonds, you have to come up with a convincing story of why you have trillions worth of bonds. You don't just dump them in a shopping bag and get payed. A scam is about the details and a period container complete with dust is a nice detail.
Mind you, you would have to be bloody greedy to believe such a scam but there are plenty of greedy people on the planet.