Can You Spare $6 Trillion?

February 17, 2012
Brother, Can You Spare $6 Trillion?
By RACHEL DONADIO

ROME — The Italian police on Friday arrested eight people on charges related to the seizure of $6 trillion in fake United States Treasury bonds, in a mysterious scheme that stretched from Hong Kong to Switzerland to the southern Italian region of Basilicata.

The value of the seized bonds is in the neighborhood of half of the United States’ entire public debt of $15.36 trillion, but only the uninitiated would have accepted them as real securities. Rather than counterfeit, they were what officials call fictitious, printed in 6,000 units of $1 billion each, a denomination that does not exist and the equivalent of $3 bills, American officials said.

In a statement on Friday, the United States Embassy in Rome said its experts had examined the bonds, which bore the date 1934, and determined that they were fictitious and apparently part of a scheme intended to defraud Swiss banks. It was unclear whether the bonds were ever used for that purpose.

The arrests on Friday, on fraud and related charges, were part of a broader investigation of organized crime in the Basilicata region, the instep of Italy’s boot, prosecutors in Potenza said in an e-mailed statement.