There are a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about the two “Japanese nationals” who were caught at the border of Italy and Switzerland with $134.5 Billion on Bearer bonds. In the comments of a post titled “Strange Inconsistencies in the $134.5 Billion Bearer Bond Mystery” on Seeking Alpha I found an interesting comment by the user RPK:
The 1934 500M Bond scam is out of the Philippines and were likely produced by one of the many Muslim extremist groups on the Southern Island of Mindanao. I know of one case where one of these groups traded several of these metal cases full of fake bonds to an individual who managed a gold mining firm near Davao as part of a payoff for them to gain access to illegally mine gold.
There are a lot of Japanese who live and visit the Southern Philippines and it may very well be that they came into contact with these fake bonds while there. I lived there for several years and was approached multiple times by people trying to pass these off. Plane Crash… found in a cave… dug up from a Jap bunker. The story was different every time but the bonds were the same fakes. Sometimes the pitch lines were quite amusing. One guy showed me one of the opened cases with the bonds and wanted me to buy two other cases that were still unopened. Why? Because once opened, they were ‘null and void.’
The paper used is the standard ‘antique’ paper you can buy at any paper store in the U.S. or the Philippines. The English on the bonds had many grammatical errors and was consistent with ‘Filipino English.’ The bonds came with many other papers to authenticate them – including microfiche film (not available in 1934 – but available at government offices in the Southern Philippines). The bonds were numbered, but inconsistently – with some pages missing numbers and others having the same numbers.
The U.S. government confiscated some of these and U.S officials were quoted in the Filipino papers saying these were ‘very good forgeries’ which, in my opinion, is not true.
Some light searching around didn’t reveal much about this scam, although I did find this question on faqs.org:
hello,about the gold certificate 1934. i have one note of that $100,000 in my possession. i was trying to verify if this is real because back in the philippines a friend found a big steel box in a cave, inside are bundles and bundles of these said notes.with serial numbers. they said, the americans kept it there before the war.philippines has been an american colony before.