The Nation: Bilking the Bilker

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The cast was a familiar one to South Vietnamese: a Cabinet minister who raked in handsome bribes and payoffs, and his wife, who made occasional trips to Switzerland to deposit the money.

But one day, according to a story making the rounds in Saigon last week, the minister's wife was stunned by a bank statement. A check for $2,000,000 had been duly honored. The only trouble was that neither she nor her husband had written such a check.

Well then, who had? Citing similar incidents in the past, knowing Saigonese suggested that the CIA might have used expert forgers as a means of punishing the corrupt minister, who was scarcely in a position to complain. All a forger would need in such a case would be an authentic check and a signature with which to practice, or the cipher code of a numbered account. Once that is provided, Swiss banks cash checks for almost any amount with few questions asked. As one banker put it last week:

"What's so special about $2,000,000?"