Cheaters now prefer government stocks 20,000 billion worth of false treasury bonds So the Swiss turn to Tomponzi 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 Treasury 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 lot of counterfeit bonds, whose value reportedly amounted 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. Individual depositors, as well as banks that often get counterfeit bonds as guarantee deposits for financing, are the favorite victims of false pretences. 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. One only has to take a look at 1996's crime news, reporting an endless series of such episodes, to grasp the extent of the phenomenon. March 5: Custom officers detect a long-established traffic of counterfeit securities in Pesaro, thus sequestering over 20 billion worth of bonds. May 20: An investigation conducted in Cattolica (Rimini) about swindles and usury leads the police to arrest a guy with 5 billion worth of false bonds in his car's boot; they were put about at very low prices, playing upon could-be customers' greed. August 31: In Trento, Custom officers in collaboration with the flying-squad arrest a lot of counterfeiters, thus sequestering 12 billion worth of false bonds and spotting a clandestine printing-office. September 5: false bonds for an overall value of 20 billion are sequestered in a Milan-based printing house by men of the Lombard capital's police headquarters.