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

[pheyton]

Something is still fishy. Why the hell did these guys think they could do anythng with a 500million dollar bond? Let alone hundreds of them! These are sums only major banks or governments can deal with.

[Mike Oxlong]

A somewhat longer write-up at Bloomberg.com:

Suitcase With $134 Billion Puts Dollar on Edge

[Osakadave]

They're fakes, and bad ones at that.

WASHINGTON, June 19 (Reuters) - A purported $134 billion in U.S. government bearer bond certificates seized by police near the Italian-Swiss border are fake, the U.S. Treasury said on Friday.

"Based on the photograph we've seen online, they are clearly fake. And not even good fakes," said Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt.

Another U.S. official said the seized bonds were purported to be issued during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, but the certificates showed a picture of a space shuttle on it -- a spacecraft that first flew in 1981.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1946360420090619

It also appears the two guys had J passports, but theat those may have been fakes too.

One summer afternoon, two "Japanese" men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso. But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134bn in US Treasury bills.

Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is not entirely clear, but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest han-diwork of the Italian Mafia.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f200bec6-5c69-11de-aea3-00144feabdc0.html

[Mulboyne]

Forbes: Italy arrests two in $116 bln fake U.S. bond probe

Italian prosecutors have arrested two Filipino nationals in an inquiry that led to seizure of a total of $116 billion in fake U.S. government bonds, the country's tax police said in a statement on Thursday. The investigation started in August when police found $103 billion in fake bonds in a parcel at Milan's Malpensa airport during a police operation against international tax evasion. The other $13 billion was found subsequently. A telephone number and other data on the parcel helped the tax police trace the two Filipinos -- a woman residing in the northern Italian city of Genoa and her brother. "The two certainly have a well defined role as part of a transnational organisation with connections in the United States," Emilio Flora, head of the tax police at Malpensa, told Reuters in a telephone interview. In June, police seized from two Japanese nationals similar fake U.S. government bonds, totalling $134 billion, at the Chiasso rail station near the Italian-Swiss border.

"There are many similarities between this case and Chiasso in regard to (the bonds) manufacture," said Fiora. "We can suppose that both bonds have a common criminal origin." The U.S. Secret Service, which polices counterfeiting of U.S. currency, was looking at possible links between the fake bond seizures, he said. The Filipinos arrested on Thursday were wiretapped while talking to Asian members of a religious community about how to "manage" the bonds once they arrived at the Malpensa airport. Subsequent searches in Genoa led to the seizure of another $13 billion in fake U.S. bonds and a guarantee certificate on a further tranche of bonds. All the bonds seized at Malpensa and Genoa belonged to a non-existent 1934 issue from the U.S. government.

[Taro Toporific]

[IkemenTommy]

"Asian members of a religious community": Hmmm, does anybody want to hazzard a guess what the name of that "religious community" is?

I'll take a wild guess... Japanese, as the original title suggests.

[FG Lurker]

I'll take a wild guess... Japanese, as the original title suggests.

(There are an unfortunately large number of Jehovah's Witnesses here though.)

[Taro Toporific]

I'll take a wild guess... Japanese, as the original title suggests.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the only religion of Japan is being Japanese. I was figuring the fucktard Japanese religious group with ties to state-sponsored counterfeiting, North Korea.



[color="Silver"]
(That is, if Tillich is right that culture is a form of religion, then the only religion of Japan is being Japanese.)[/color]

[kurohinge1]

... These are sums only major banks or governments can deal with.

Maybe they just wanted to eat at Passetto's!

[iHUMAN]

4 million dollars or 4 [color="Red"]billion [/color]dollars?

Which is gonna raise more eyebrows?

Fucking stupid!!!!

How the fuck are you gonna spend billions of dollars anyhoo????

Fucking stupid!!!!

[FG Lurker]

[quote="FG Lurker"]:lol: ]
Thank's for the anonymous red snot from the lover of the cult of jehovah. Organized religion in general is pretty fucked up but the JW cult is more fucked than most. I wear your red snot with pride.

[TennoChinko]

Any connection to these arrests?

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/17/world/europe/italy-counterfeit-bonds/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

[SIZE="4"]Arrests made in Italy after discovery of $6 trillion in fake U.S. bonds[/SIZE]
By the CNN Wire Staff
February 17, 2012 -- Updated 1659 GMT (0059 HKT)

(CNN) -- Italian authorities on Friday arrested eight people in possession of an estimated $6 trillion in counterfeit U.S. Treasury bonds, according to Italian paramilitary police and an Italian news agency.

The discovery of the fake bonds -- made to look as if they were printed by the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1934 -- came about as part of an investigation into a local mafia association.

The arrest order for the alleged criminals was issued by a preliminary investigative judge in the southern Italian city of Potenza, police noted.

Italian authorities, working with their Swiss counterparts, learned about the counterfeit bonds by way of eavesdropping on wiretapped phones, police said.
The total of $6 trillion is more than twice the Italy's national debt.

The Italian news agency, ANSA, reported that the bonds were also discovered "alongside copies of the Treaty of Versailles rolled inside lead cylinders."

CNN can not independently verify that account.

[TennoChinko]

Here's the previous 2009 case on wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasso_financial_smuggling_case

[maraboutslim]

Update: Conspiracy theorists will like this one

http://www.divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/995-lawsuit-end-tyranny

Have any of you ever interacted with this Benjamin Fulford character in Japan? How about Chodoin Daikaku?

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

Have any of you ever interacted with this Benjamin Fulford character in Japan?

I knew him in the '90s when he worked for Forbes. He was decent enough then and never gave any indication of how loose his marbles would become.

He's reasonably well respected in parts of the Japanese media.

As long as he doesn't talk about his conspiracy theories, he's a decent bloke.

...but he rarely talks about much other than his conspiracy theories.

[maraboutslim]

From what I can gather from the links, there has been a lawsuit filed in the usa by a guy representing the "dragon families," seeking the return of the $134bil in u.s. bonds (which have actual value of over $1tril) and damages. The claim is that these bonds were paid to the dragon families in exchange for gold/silver in the 1930s that was used to support and establish the u.s.dollar as the world's reserve currency. This organization supposedly has many trillions in bonds that they plan to use and have been using for global humanitarian means. The lawsuit claims all the bonds are registered and verifiable...

There is some other crazy info about dragon family members being over 1500 years old and so on but the financial stuff is more interesting.