One of the smaller pleasures of banking is reading the fraud reports In fact as small pleasures go it it comes second only to the aviation incident reports, which sometimes read like an installment of the Keystone Cops, particularly when they involve helicopters and logging (load of logs drops out of harness, harness bounces up and wraps itself round the rotor blades, surprisingly frequent).
Anyway the fraud reports, which are crculated amongst banks list the dodgy characters who walk in with all sorts of weird and wonderful instruments which they try to use as collateral for borrowing real money - fake diamonds, Bolivian bearer bonds, US Treasury bills from the 1920's whose face value exceeded the entire US National Debt of the day, letters of credit signed by Napoleon III etc, you get the picture. The reports usually end with the words: "Business declined".
But until yesterday I had never heard of anything as daring or foolhardy as this *3 trillion* dollar attempted fraud.
10/10 for ambition, but 0/10 for common sense.
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