Apply "Occam's razor"..fake bearer bonds everywhere...
The following was back in 2001...
2bit
"Billion dollar bond scam busted, more arrests pending
Updated Thu. Feb. 15 2001 8:09 AM ET
Investigators are following up on leads to determine if a $25-billion US bond scam is linked to organized crime in Asia.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the U.S. Secret Service made a pair of arrests Monday, just five days after two men tried to deposit phony U.S. bearer bonds at a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch in Toronto, asking for a letter of credit for a portion of the amount.
Banking officials alerted police after failing to verify the bonds' authenticity. On Monday, Sung Taek Park, 67, of Japan and Michael Johnson, 37, an Ontario resident were taken into custody and police say more arrests are pending.
A bond is an IOU, usually issued by a government or company. Unlike regular bonds, a bearer bond belong to the holder and isn't usually registered to an owner in a central database.
The documents are very high quality, there is a great of deal of sophistication going into making these, said RCMP Sergeant Gord Jamieson at a news conference in Toronto Wednesday. It isn't amateurish at all...I wouldn't be surprised if organized crime is linked to this.
SUSPICION PAYS OFF
Police praised banking authorities for conducting a thorough investigation when the suspicious bonds were presented, Feb. 7. When banking officials were unable to authenticate the bonds, they went on the Internet to check the website of the U.S. Treasury Bureau of Public Debt. That's where they read about another bond scam.
The huge sum of money is something that definitely would raise flags to financial institutions and fortunately, you can't go to the local QuickMart or 7-Eleven and buy a pack of cigarettes with a $100 million bearer bond, said Tim Koerner, an agent with the U.S. Secret Service, at a Toronto news conference.
The likelihood of these actually making it through the banking system into the United States Federal Reserve system is extremely remote because of the high-dollar amount and the scrutiny that they would receive at that level, he added.
RCMP Sgt. Gord Jamieson said there were other tell-tale signs the bonds were fake. For one thing, the technology needed to print bonds didn't exist in the 1930's, at the time when the phony bonds were supposed to have been created. Zip codes was also printed on the phony bonds, even though the U.S. government didn't use zip codes until the 60's.
Our financial institutions, should they have issued the letter of credit, would have been the loser in this particular investigation, said Jamieson.
Phony bonds are rarely cashed in, but as long as they're undetected they can be used as collateral for brokerage accounts, real estate, or obtaining a line of credit at a casino.
The U.S. Secret Service says Canada was probably targeted because foreign bonds are not as well known to Canadian banks. I think that if you're dealing with securities of a foreign country that it becomes easier to perpetrate because the knowledge of what constitutes a genuine article is not as readily available, Koerner said.
Both suspects have been charged with conspiracy to utter a forged document, conspiracy to commit fraud, uttering a forged document, and attempted fraud over $5,000.
AI
