Would you buy 135 billion dollars worth of bonds?

This article describes a recent seizure of ~$135,000,000,000 worth of the US national debt.
Some Japanese nationals were caught trying to cross from Italy into Switzerland with the bonds, the smallest of which were worth $500,000,000.

Here's an interesting analysis of the problems with the story:

You're not going to walk into a bank with $130 billion in bearer bonds and cash them. Nor are you going to sell a bond with a $500 million face value to someone without them authenticating it. They will be authenticated before you get one dime out of them - no matter who you think you're going to "give" them to.
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Next, unless someone knew you were smuggling them, why would you be subject to that sort of search? What made the people involved "interesting" to the authorities? This doesn't sound like a random stop to me; how many people are carrying $130 billion in bearer bonds at any given point in time?
So let's assume that the certificates are real, as German media seems to believe and which, by the way, makes logical sense given what they were and the sheer impossibility of cashing a fake $500 million bond.

Ok, who has $130 billion in bearer bonds? Remember, bearer instruments haven't been issued by the Treasury since 1982... The answer to that question: it is rather unlikely that there remains $130 billion of legitimate US Bearer issuance outstanding anywhere - to anyone.

So what remains? Let's run a theory here - one of the few possible remaining options, given the exclusion of what we know not to be true...

Are we willing to assume that all the "issue" of Treasury bonds has been done "above board" as required by law. If Treasury has been surreptitiously issuing bonds to, say, Japan, as a means of financing deficits that someone didn't want reported over the last, oh, say 10 or 20 years...

I'm no expert on bonds or international debt, but anytime there's a chance of international espionage and government cover-ups that will affect the exchange rate on my next ebay purchase, you've got my attention. If it turns out that these guys really were trying to sell fake 500-million-dollar bonds... that would be pretty hilarious, actually.
Imagine all the chocolate you could get from an unsuspecting Nestlè executive...