12-02-24 HOW much?!?

Game theory can easily explain many financial crimes, as it can be treated as an investment with odds of a positive or negative payout.  Due to the negative payout being rather severe (jail time, for example), one easily-drawn conclusion is that if you intend to make money through financial crime, it is probably advantageous to commit one big crime that if successful will be enough for a lifetime, rather than a bunch of minor crimes.  This could probably be labeled the Madoff Principle over its most famous proponent. 

Like any rule, you can take it to logical extremes.  For example, The police and governance of Southern Italy is usually considered at best amongst the First World’s ‘least authoritarian’, and at worst rather inactive in the face of organized crime.  It turns out that there’s a level of fraud that will draw the attention of the authorities even there.

For example, if you try to conduct a fraud for $6,000,000,000,000 US dollars (Six TRILLION) using fake Billion-dollar US bonds, it will not work.  Someone is going to look into it, even if the police responsible to investigate are from Potenza, a rural inland Southern Italian town of about 70,000 people.  According to Reuters, last week eight criminals were arrested for this crime.  Apparently the “year-long investigation...began as an investigation into mafia loan-sharking, but gradually expanded.”  Hopefully, not too much of that year was required to determine that your average collection of 6000 billion dollar US bonds (about 1/3 of the value of all US bonds issued!) is probably fake, although the U.S. Embassy to Italy mentioned in a press release that “U.S. experts” were responsible for recognizing the fraudulent bonds. 

Also, apparently in northern Italy a similar fraud was attempted and stopped in 2009.  I had not heard of this incident, probably because only the paltry sum of $742,000,000,000 US dollars ($742 billion) was involved that time.