❝ There were plenty of clues that a billion-dollar U.S. bearer bond that a man tried to cash in Fort Lauderdale was just too good to be true…
The bond, supposedly issued in 1934, appears to have been printed on an inkjet printer and seemed to contain a security thread – both technologies that did not exist until many years later, investigators said. The counterfeit bond also featured a photograph of Grover Cleveland, who was president in the 1880s and 1890s.
But perhaps the biggest clue was the eye-popping billion-dollar figure on the face of the bond. U.S. Secret Service Agent Charles Callahan told a judge Wednesday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale that the highest-valued bearer bond in that era was $10,000 and the highest-valued bond ever was a $1 million one issued in 1978.
❝ Hugo Barrios Briceno, the 50-year-old Venezuelan man accused of trying to cash the counterfeit bond at a Fort Lauderdale financial business earlier this month, will remain locked up because he is a potential flight risk, U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick Hunt ruled Wednesday…
The judge asked to see the document during the court hearing, joking: “Believe it or not, I’ve never seen a billion-dollar bond before.”
“That’s because they don’t exist — not legally anyway,” prosecutor Daniel Cervantes quipped…
❝ Prosecutors said that the bond would have an equivalent value of 19 billion dollars in today’s currency. They also said that a simple Google search would have shown Barrios Briceno that billion-dollar bonds are not legitimate.
❝ The judge said the evidence presented so far was sufficient but not “overwhelming,” adding that he thinks the outcome of the prosecution will hinge on precisely what Barrios Briceno said during an audio-and-video-recorded meeting with undercover Secret Service agents in Fort Lauderdale.
It would not be a crime to try to verify if the bond was genuine but it would be illegal to attempt to cash it while claiming it was valid…
Hey, maybe he was hustled by some dude who used it for loan collateral back in South America. Or maybe he’s a con man who didn’t do his homework.