False treasury bonds, alarm bursts. A 20,000 billion business Rome. The officially ascertained value of false treasury bonds circulating in Italy amounts to 2,500 billion lire. But the underground market, experts assure, may by now have produced over 20,000 billion lire worth of false bonds. These estimates, made by "Tomponzi Investigations" and supported by a comparison with the Carabinieri's monetary counterfeit squad (Noam), have cast a new light on this serious issue, which has urged the Treasure and the State Printing Works and Stationery Office to take anti-counterfeit measures, such as a new kind of paper and print types and the insertion of three special threads running through the new bonds horizontally Less than two years ago, as the investigation agency's note reports, Salerno's Antimafia District Attorney office found out about a big lot of counterfeit bonds, whose value would amount to 5 thousand billion lire. But, contrary to what one may suppose, the real clearing station for illegal bonds is Northern Italy. Here, according to investigators, an approximate 70% of the total false bonds would be printed and issued. Being almost as "liquid" as banknotes, but "physically" less known by investors, treasury bonds have long been preferred by cheats. Recently, probably due to the countermeasures adopted, most of the Italian liability bonds were sold abroad, with a preference for Eastern Europe (with Romania ranking first), but without neglecting the most developed financial circuits. And just from Switzerland, where a society had been offered a doubtful purchase of bonds selling below cost, "Tomponzi Investigations" received the authorization to investigate.