Quote from peilthetraveler:
Obviously this kind of scam works somewhat in the fact that so many bonds were printed. I mean it seems at least once per year someone is caught with a huge dollar amount of bonds like this article from 10 years ago where someone was caught with $2 trillion in bonds.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1180171.stm
Some of these people must be getting lines of credit at banks and using these bonds as collateral. I suppose if you got a line of credit and funded a business venture and always made your payments on time, nobody would ever be the wiser.
The article you quoted describes events in the Philippines going back to 2001 and earlier. Two TRILLION dollars worth of bonds. A year earlier, 2000, it says 60 BILLION coming from the same area, and another 50 BILLION a month before that...all said to be "fake". Let's take a closer look:
"David Popp of the US Treasury Department said the fakes were of very good quality, but some of the bond denominations did not exist. "
Ok, so which of the bond denominations DID exist? "Good quality"...compared to what?
Here's another question, who, besides anyone at the US Treasury or connected with the Federal Reserve, could be considered knowledgeable enough about these sorts of things to be able to say what is a fake, and what is not? Of course, they are the first authorities we would think to ask about such things. But so far, every bond ever paraded across the press has been declared a "fake", which make me wonder if we aren't asking the wrong departments. These departments are MOST liable, if any of these bonds were declared to be authentic.
So, what market is there for these kinds of bonds?
"'"We know they were selling some bonds to very curious buyers - businessmen in the area,'' he said. Last year, police seized more than $60bn in fake US bills, treasury notes and bonds. They apparently were being smuggled out of the country for sell abroad. "
Apparently? And, what kind of "businessman" would buy a bond of 100 Million or even 250 Million denomination? For how much? I think it would be safe to say no businessman would pay anything even near face value to anyone in a small town in southern Philippines. Suppose a businessman did buy a 100 Million bond from someone in a "house" in southern Philippines. Who would the businessman sell it to, in order to make a profit? What kind of *front* would the businessman need to craft, in order to make these bonds appear to have more value than they would appear to have, coming from a house in Cagayan De Oro? Wouldn't the businessman at least need to appear to be a bank, or even to actually BE a bank?
None of these "businessman" scenarios seem plausible to me, so i'm willing to categorize the whole "businessman" angle as SPIN. "Curious buyers" seems more plausible. If I was in Cagayan De Oro, i'd probably give $100 for a bond, regardless it was authentic or not...IF it was "good quality", ha ha! The bonds value to me, at $100, would be based on the fact that there was a time and place, where such bonds WERE authentic, and i'm taking home a bit of legend and lore. Authenticity would hardly make the bond more valuable under the circumstances...unless i thought i could find the original owner of the bond, and receive a finders fee. In Cagayan De Oro, i could also probably buy a fake Rolex for $20 that actually works. Does that mean there were never any authentic Rolex watches? But even if i could get a 100 Million bond for $100, it may not be worth it because these things are likely to be *toxic* whenever trying to cross a border (airport etc.). So the fake Rolex market is likely to be more robust in Cagayan De Oro, and the fake bond market is likely to be ZERO, except for small, common denominations.
I spent time in the Philippines in 1997, and was approached with what was probably a scam that i'll briefly describe to you. Someone, who had done *due diligence*, had discovered one of the places where the Japanese army had hurriedly buried a lot of gold, as they were being expelled from the Philippines, and while sea lanes back to Tokyo had been cut by the US Navy. What the man needed from me, the tourist, was about $6000 in order to continue his mining endeavors...to dig through the next obstacle that was keeping the gold hidden underground. And of course, i would be paid in gold when it was finally excavated. This scam has traction because of the commonly accepted lore that there are indeed such caches of gold, and that Marcos had discovered one or more of them. It was appealing because his due diligence was described in detail, and the value of the gold can mostly be salvaged even if it was melted down and sold for its weight. In retrospect, the location of any such caches would be well-known to the global cabal that controls the gold hidden therein, and uses it as a basis for a black market. And that would explain why, even then, any story about the extraction of such gold included a story about how someone had died trying to get to it.
A bond scam, however, doesn't have even near this much traction, however risky. Unlike gold, the bond is hardly salvageable, even if authentic. So why are they regularly finding "fake" bonds? One reason could be that during WWII, a plane from the US Air Force (a bomber?) went down in southern Philippines containing a cache of these bonds, and was found by tribesmen. The article you quoted wants to paint that story a fake as well:
"''Very frequently these fraudsters weave a tale that there are these long-lost Federal Reserve bonds hidden away or found in a plane crash,'' he said. "
This is probably the truest aspect of this alleged "scam", which gives traction to whatever bonds are being sold from the southern Philippines, at whatever small price. This aspect of the story is confirmed true, according to the article i posted
here, in another thread. Those bonds, if dated 1934, would not have been in the process of delivery to a gold-owner. Those would have been the bonds that were, during the chaos of war, being taken back from from their legitimate holders, as part of a black ops program to destroy or otherwise devalue them through the manufacture of fakes. (Kind of like the way the Fed devalues our current dollars by printing more money out of thin air). Most likely, the bonds in the southern Philippines were being held in hopes the legitimate owners would come knocking in exchange for a finders fee, before the black ops operation caught up with them. In this case, imo, black ops caught up with them before they could find the owners. They could be fake, because the black ops have always been involved in making fakes, to devalue (if unable to destroy) the original lot of 1934 bonds, issued to various heads of state in exchange for gold that was in danger of confiscation (ie. by the Japanese) anyway. They could be authentic, having been en-route (if dated during the war) to a head of state who was agreeing to take them in exchange for gold that might otherwise fall into the hands of the Japanese. They could be both!
"They said the large-denomination counterfeit bonds may have been intended to be sold as part of ''lost treasure'' scam where buyers are told the documents have recently been found."
If anyone can explain exactly how such a scam would work, and make it sound anything like the gold scam i described above, maybe this would be plausible. But at face value, this story does not seem plausible to me. There is simply NO SERIOUS MARKET for that kind of "treasure", except for it's place in history as a fraud perpetrated by the Federal Reserve. The market, if in any way significant, would be to the occasional Indian Jones who thinks he can find the original holder for a finders fee (before black ops catches up)...who themselves would be facing an uphill climb to have the bonds recognized, acknowledged, and redeemed. Risky business indeed. A curiosity-seeker market is not going to be significant (also not plausible), nor worth the work and risk of counterfeiting such documents.
According to the article i've pointed to, a viable owner has recently filed (last November?) a suit in a New York high court, using a high profile lawyer...trying to have their bonds recognized and acknowledged. This case, some believe, will blow the whole lid off this whole sordid business.