Gang attempted to pass £500,000 notes, court told An Australian "lawyer" is part of a gang of six up before Southwark Crown Court accused of attempting to convince the Bank of England to honour a breathtaking £28bn ($64.83bn) in moody £1,000 and £500,000 notes, AFP reports. The cunning plan centred on an "avalanche" of fake £1k bills and 360 so-called "special issue" £500k …
The forgeries weren't very good.
One of the denominations never existed.
The other was carefully accounted for, as you would expect of notes that valuable.
The only denomination that was ever issued has now expired and could only be exchanged by the Bank itself as a favour and, therefore, subjected to closer scrutiny than would normally be expected of a note
So, is this some strange use of the word "audacious" of which the rest of us have yet to be advised? My Thesaurus fails to list it as a synonym for "mind-numbingly incompetant". A terrible oversight.
No doubt at some point they'll be describing the ringleader as a "mastermind", a synonym for "fuckwit" as any fule kno.
I have a Malaysian Chinese mate who does business in pubs - works full time so has to have meetings outside hours.
I'm pretty sure that his wacky schemes have amounted to no more than a couple of pig iron shipments from Europe to Korea.
What were they thinking? It must be embarrassing being the prosecuting authorities.
Maybe I could sell them some monopoly money before the skip on bail...
A quick search on Google News threw out quite a nice image of the £500,000 note. What is notable is that there are grammatical errors - spaces missing in the phony cashier instruction on the back - and it's very, very obviously been based on two different old notes. The Duke of Wellington on the back is pulled from an 80s-style fiver and the front appears to be based on a 60s note. They've used the number 5 from the real note and then slapped on five zeroes made in WordArt by the looks of things. Character spacing is abysmal throughout.
See for yourself:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twindx/1706720663/
Honestly, it looks like a half-assed 419er piece of work!
I vaguely remember a similar scheme from a "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" comic book, involving sticking extra zeros onto dollar bills and duplex colour photocopying. Of course, the Freaks' scheme worked; but that *was* just a story (and Gilbert Shelton actually knew a lot about real-life printing technologies).
Not to say that I haven't had a go at passing off the odd forgery myself, but at least I mostly stuck to bus tickets. Why bus tickets? Because that was my main mode of transport; and besides, the security measures were non-existent. After all, who would ever think of forging a bus ticket?! I just used to grab a roll-end from the litter bin when the driver refilled the machine; then print up return tickets (ostensibly issued earlier that day, at my intended destination) using a dot-matrix cunningly retrofitted with the right shade of purple ribbon and some home-written software.
"So: are you saying that this note I bought on eBay isn't real ?
I was hoping to double my money :-("
Hey, it's easy to double your money. Take a bill, of any denomination, and grasp the left-hand corner. Fold it over to cover the corresponding right-hand corner. Press flat.
Voila! You have "doubled" your money.*
Ed Drone
* This technique will not work with coinage, unless you're extremely strong.
...handing out, as we do, billions in unearned VAT refunds (i.e. carousel fraud), in Tax Credits for gangsters, great amounts to 419 fraudsters, and no doubt all sorts of other undeserved monies to people who know they shouldn't be getting them.
They probably thought we wouldn't even be able to read, let alone count the banknotes...
Seriously? Really?! There's got to be more to it.
Trying to pass off counterfeit money at a bank is like sticking up a police station with a toy gun. I don't even know where to start with the amount... well, it's like sticking up a police station with a toy gun and demanding twenty-seven billion pounds actually. Nobody who's smart enough to actually do it is dumb enough to try it.
There's must be more to this than meets the eye. I'm thinking it's a government conspiracy to get out of paying the 27 billion pounds they just realized they actually owed someone. How convenient for them that the notes turned out to be such obvious forgeries.
Hi all,
I wanted to highlight the possibility that these notes MAY have been genuine issues and the good old B of E is playing games.
I am a professional numismatist, with nearly 20-year’s experience- 12 of which in Asia.
I refer to Sterling Seagraves outstanding book- Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold.
Visit his site: http://www.bowstring.net/
In this book, Seagrave tells the tale of billions in gold looted by the Japanese during WWII. He also touches upon a scheme where Japanese bonds were declared illegal (fake) saving them billions possibly trillions.
Think about it: With communist china massing on the Hong Kong border, what motive would the B of E possibly have for issuing currency? And are the potential mistakes plausible deniability?
In addition, there is another case concerning American Ambassador LEO WANTA, commonly known as the TRILLION DOLLAR MAN who was imprisoned for his part in a Regan scheme to destroy the Russian rouble. Again a diplomat who was imprisoned; how did he loose his countries protection?
http://www.rense.com/general70/leo.htm
Personally I DO NOT agree with every detail- accept the FACT that our governments screw us every single day, and the possibility does exists that these notes were once issued – legally or illegally to Chinese Nationalist.
It is so outrageous, it could be true.
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