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Report of 1 Kilo Gold Bar Filled with Tungsten Found in UK March 26, 2012 “What appears to be a tungsten filled gold bar has been found – this time in the UK. It is believed that a scrap dealer bought the Metalor 1 kilo gold bar of 99.98% purity from a member of the public. Metalor are a leading international gold refiner and bar manufacturer, headquartered in Zurich. The bar appears to have been tampered with and may have had holes drilled into it or melted out and then had tungsten rods inserted or tungsten poured into the holes....

(LEAD) N. Korea says two Japanese detainees to face legal actions SEOUL, May 4 (Yonhap) -- North Korea said Wednesday that it will take legal actions against two Japanese citizens detained since March on charges of drug trafficking and counterfeiting. North Korea arrested Masaki Furuya of JP Dairin and two other Japanese citizens after they entered Rason City in the North's special economic zone near North Korea's border with Russia on March 14. The North later expelled Furuya while it is preparing to take legal actions against Hidehiko Abe and Takumi Hirooka of two separate Japanese companies. "What they did...

PITTSBURGH -- Two Mexican nationals were set to plead guilty in Pittsburgh to a federal grand jury indictment charging them with possessing nearly $38,700 in counterfeit $100 bills. The U.S. Secret Service took over the case after local police arrested the man on charges they passed some of the bills in October at a Macy's story in North Franklin Township, Washington County. Alejandro Ceron, 31, and Israel Sanchez, 23, both gave Brooklyn, N.Y., addresses but authorities said both men also had Mexican identification cards. Police said at least two of the $100 bills had the same serial number. Still, authorities...

Ron Paul and Sovereign Citizen types are going berserk about this pretty interesting currency case. http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20110319/NEWS01/110319006/Liberty-Dollar-creator-convicted-federal-court A man has been convicted and could face 25 years in federal prison on counterfeiting charges, for what the government describes as a form of domestic terror designed to destabilize US currency. Bernard von NotHaus is some kind of anti-fed type who has minted and distributed millions of “Liberty Dollars”: silver coins that are 100% backed by precious metals he owns and are meant to be a more stable alternative to the US dollar. He claims the Liberty Coins are a form of barter,...

LAS VEGAS -- An unemployed graphic designer who told investigators that he found making ricin an "exotic idea" pleaded guilty Monday to possessing the deadly toxin in a hotel room here. Roger Bergendorff, 57, also pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge. (A second weapons charge was dropped.) He could face up to 20 years in prison at his Nov. 3 sentencing, though prosecutors are recommending that he serve a little more than three years. Bergendorff reportedly fantasized about harming people with the poison -- he had sketched an "injection delivery device" disguised as a pen -- but never carried...

Funny money is turning up in record amounts now that computers and high-tech printers have taken the skill out of counterfeiting, the U.S. Secret Service says. The agency said that in 2009 more than 60 percent of counterfeit bills were created on digital printers. In 1995 only 1 percent were. "There really is no craftsmanship or workmanship in this anymore," Special Agent Scott Vogel, a 20-year veteran, told the Detroit Free Press. "If you're able to put a piece of paper in a copy machine and push a button, that's pretty much all it takes." In the old days, investigators...

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have unveiled the new 100 dollar bill which will go into circulation starting on February 10th, 2011. Officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve System and the United States Secret Service held a press conference in Washington D.C. today to show off the new security features which they hope will reduce the threat of counterfeiting. The 100 dollar bill is the highest denomination of all Federal Reserve notes currently being produced, and circulation of the 100 dollar Federal Reserve note in the past 25 years has grown from $180...

Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of fraudulent Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears. The evidence of forgery and manipulation of images of official documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of Hawaii birth certificate images on the Photobucket site and the detective work of independent investigative journalists and imaging professionals in the three weeks since the publication of the images, implicate the Daily Kos,...

TUCSON—An indictment was unsealed today in Tucson charging four naturalized U.S. citizens with a scheme which involved the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted DVDs which netted them approximately $3 million dollars. A federal grand jury in Tucson returned a 10-count indictment against Chuen Han Yuen (aka Jason Yuen), 29; Man Yam Yuen, 58; Tsao Ping Ng, 54; and Sin L. Yuen (aka Michelle Yuen), 31, all originally of Hong Kong, charging them with Conspiracy, Mail Fraud, Wire Fraud and Copyright Infringement. Jason Yuen, Man Yam Yuen and Tsao Ping Ng were arrested without incident today by Special Agents with...

Kellogg's has developed a hi-tech method to stamp out imitation cereals - by branding individual flakes of corn with the company logo.   The new technology enables the firm - which makes 67million boxes of Corn Flakes every year - to burn the famous signature onto individual flakes using lasers.  Kellogg's plans to produce a number one-off trial batches of the branded flakes to test the system. Bosses will then consider inserting a proportion of branded flakes into each box to guarantee the cereal's origins and protect against imitation products.  If the system is successful it could be used...

Note: The following text is a quote: YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: Ecuador Conterfeiting Problems CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Americas - Ecuador 30 Jul 2009 U.S. Embassy Quito issued the following Warden Message on July 30, 2009: The U.S. Embassy and Consulate General in Ecuador wish to inform American citizens visiting or resident in Ecuador of the continuing problem of counterfeit U.S. dollars circulating within Ecuador. We remind American citizens to check your currency carefully when leaving any banking institution or private business within Ecuador. Recently, we’ve received reports of counterfeit bills...

NEW ORLEANS, LA—JALLA PIERRE EMANUEL, age 38, and JACKSON NTONE NDEMBA, age 35, citizens of the Republic of Cameroon, were arrested yesterday by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged by a criminal complaint with conspiracy and wire fraud, announced U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, EMANUEL and NDEMBA fraudulently represented that they could produce two counterfeit bills utilizing one real bill. FBI investigation eventually resulted in a meeting with the defendants in which the defendants expected to receive $60,000 in U.S. currency from which they said they would...

A reporter is sent to Italy to learn more about the bond smuggling story. But nobody knows where the two men are. At least the Japanese press is sitll interested in story of the two Japanese men caugh withs ome $134.5 billion in (presumably fake) US bearer bonds. We can't read Japanese, and Google Translate isn't particularly helpful, but a reader informs us that the gist of this story is that a newspaper sent a reporter to Como, Italy and found that the men had been released, with their whereabouts unknown. Now, the easiest, most-benign explanation for this whole thing...

WASHINGTON—Rodolfo Rodriguez Cabrera, 43, a Cuban national, and Henry Mantilla, 35, of Cape Coral, Florida, have been charged in a scheme to produce and sell counterfeit International Game Technology (IGT)-brand video gaming machines, commonly known as slot machines, and counterfeit IGT computer programs, announced Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada Gregory A. Brower, and FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Las Vegas Field Office Steven M. Martinez. Cabrera was arrested June 8, 2009, in Riga, Latvia, based on the indictment. Mantilla is scheduled to appear based on a...

Ok, this was rumored several days ago, but now I can find actual news reports - at least, outside the US: Milan (AsiaNews) – Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each. Those sound like Bearer Bonds - at least the Kennedy ones do. We no longer issue those (nor...

Last Wednesday, the Fed announced that it would buy $1.2 trillion in new assets--$300 billion of which would be Treasuries, the rest mortgage-backed securities, or, well... we don't really know quite what. The term that's gaining currency (no pun intended!) to describe this phenomenon is 'quantitative easing.' It happens when a central bank has lowered interest rates so low that the only way to continue pumping money into the market is to create it out of thin air.

The Secret Service agent in Kansas City peered hard at a counterfeit $100 bill, ran a finger over it and grimaced in disgust. It was bad, ugly work. “Too slick, too,” said Charles Green, special agent in charge. More counterfeiters are using today’s ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that’s just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful. In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all...

SHANGHAI — A court in southern China convicted 11 people on Wednesday of violating national copyright laws and participating in a sophisticated counterfeiting ring that for years manufactured and distributed pirated Microsoft software throughout the world. The men were sentenced by a court in the city of Shenzhen to terms of 18 months to six and a half years in prison, according to court papers released late Wednesday. Microsoft applauded the sentence in a statement released late Wednesday Beijing time, saying they were the stiffest sentences ever handed down in this type of Chinese copyright infringement case. Microsoft has called...

WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday night, President Bush addressed the nation in an effort to persuade Congress to pass a bill to reduce the risk to major financial institutions and to safeguard American families and businesses. On Thursday, he met with Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama and other congressional leaders to build a consensus plan for bailing out our financial system. The potentates on the Potomac now are pondering the price tag for saving Wall Street. Unfortunately, corrupt officials in other nations' capitals are also hard at work -- undermining what's left of the U.S. dollar by printing and distributing...

EVANSVILLE, Indiana (AP) — Federal agents raided the headquarters of a group that produces illegal currency and puts it in circulation, seizing gold, silver and two tons of copper coins featuring Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Agents also took records, computers and froze the bank accounts at the "Liberty Dollar" headquarters during the Thursday raid, Bernard von NotHaus, founder of the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act & Internal Revenue Code, said in a posting on the group's Web site. The organization, which is critical of the Federal Reserve, has repeatedly clashed with the federal government,...