$6 trillion USA fake bonds found in bank vault

$6trn Of Fake US Bonds Found In Bank Vault

11:47pm UK, Friday February 17, 2012

Anti-mafia investigators have found fake US treasury bonds with a face value of $6trn (£3.8trn) hidden in a Swiss bank vault.

The bonds were discovered inside false compartments in three reinforced metal crates in Zurich.

The face value amount equates to more than a third of US national debt.

 

Fake US bonds were uncovered by an anti-mafia crime unit in ItalySome bond certificates were valued at $1bn each

Eight arrests have been made in Italy, in an investigation led by Italian authorities and aided by theUS Secret Service and technical experts.

“These fictitious bonds were apparently part of a plan to defraud some Swiss banks,” the US embassy in Rome said in a statement.

Operation Vulcania, which actually took place in November last year, has only now been revealed.

Italian investigators said members of a criminal network had tried to use the bonds in emerging markets around the world or to give them to banks as collateral for loans.

The bonds were dated 1934 and one of the deposit boxes also contained a forgery of the Treaty of Versailles, which investigators said could have been used to justify the sums involved as payments between states following World War I.

 

A trunk containing fake US Treasury bonds was embossed with A fake 1919 Treaty of Versailles was also in the haul

The operation was “the biggest for this type of investigation,” Giovanni Colangelo, the head of the prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Potenza, said.

The trail to the bank vault started with an an investigation into southern Italian mafia clans, Mr Colangelo said.

The investigation allowed detectives to uncover “an international network with people implicated in numerous countries,” he said without giving more details and adding that he believed more fake bonds were still hidden.

US Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary said: “Our Rome office assisted the Italian authorities with expertise and confirmation that the subject obligations were fictitious.”

A US law enforcement source said: “Part of the scam is that you say: ‘We came up with this from long lost supply of US government notes that were hidden in a warehouse.’

“Essentially, if it is too good to be true, it probably is.”

 

A fake US federal reserve bond valued at $1bnCopies of US Federal Reserve certificates were also found

The eight people arrested are all Italian nationals and include 69-year-old Rocco Menzella, a former mayor of the town of Montescaglioso in southern Italy.

Friday’s was not the first seizure of fake US bonds by Italian authorities but it is the one with by far the highest face value.

In September 2009, Italian police seized $116bn (£73bn) in phoney bonds and arrested two Filipino nationals carrying them at Milan’s airport.

And just months earlier, police arrested two Japanese nationals on the Italian-Swiss border carrying bonds with a face value of $134bn (£84bn).

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