A Christmas Miracle?

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A single father stumbles upon $50K in bonds in a discarded Christmas box and tries to return the money to the owner.

Questions:
1. What are bearer bonds? What types of journal entries are associated with them for the issuer? Give examples.
2. What had Mr. Tran done that made these bonds worthless? What do you think would have happened if Mr. Garofalo had tried to cash them in?
3. If you were advising a client who had this amount of bearer bonds, what would you tell them about storage?

Source:

Bleier, E. (2013). Florida man finds $50K worth of bonds in trashed Christmas tree box. UPI.com, Dec. 9 (Retrievable online at http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/Blog/2013/12/09/Florida-man-finds-50K-worth-of-bonds-in-trashed-Christmas-tree-box/9231386600046/)

CNN Video. (2013). Man finds 50K in bonds in Christmas box, Dec. 12 (Retrievable at http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2013/12/12/man-finds-50k-in-bonds-in-box-good-stuff-newday.cnn.html)

News 13 staff. (2013). Christmas “miracle” bonds prove worthless. HD Channel 13, Dec. 12 (Retrievable online at http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/bn9/2013/12/12/anthony_garofalo_bon.html?cid=rss)