Italian police bust $6-trillion US Treasury bonds fraud

It was an offer that turned out to be quite easy to turn down. A cache of 6,000 US Treasury bonds each having a face value of $1 billion was on offer for a limited period. The $6-trillion offer, came with a signed copy of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 document that ended World War I, to boot.

There were a couple of problems though, with the documents confiscated by Italian police in Switzerland, as part of an international fraud investigation. The soaring federal budget deficit, apart, the US government does not sell a $1-billion Treasury bond, rather, it does not even sell paper bonds anymore. All transactions are now electronic.

The seized documents held the same value as $3 carnival bills.

"It's a piece of paper with something printed on it," Brian Leary, a spokesman for the US Secret Service, said of the $1-billion bonds, which contained the image of President Wilson. "It's worthless."

US authorities helped the police in Italy to declare that the bonds were fake.

"These fictitious bonds were allegedly part of a scheme to defraud Swiss banks," said the US Embassy in Rome.