Eight Japanese investors pooled their money to buy incredibly rare US$1 million notes from 1928 that they believed could be resold for ten times what they paid. Over several years, the men paid out more than 150 million yen (US$1.27 million) to the president of a construction materials company who was brokering the deal. Last March though, just a month before they were told they'd receive the $1 million notes, the president of the company disappeared. Worse, it turns out that the largest US bill ever printed was a $100,000 note. From the Associated Press:
The investors were told that the U.S. government printed the bills in 1928 when Chiang Kai-shek was still in power in China to allow Americans to bring their assets back home, Asahi said.
The president showed them a thousand of the $1 million notes featuring a portrait of George Washington at a Tokyo hotel, according to Asahi. The investors were told the notes could be exchanged for smaller denominations in Hong Kong, but no exchange ever took place, it reported.
"We continued to fork over money because we were promised, 'You'll get several hundreds of millions of yen in three days,' or 'You'll get that amount in a week,'" one investor was quoted as saying.
