North Macedonia official arrested for euro counterfeiting

An employee of the Ministry of Interior in North Macedonia has been arrested on suspicion of manufacturing "hundreds of thousands" of fake €2 coins, says Europol.

The 34-year-old man was taken into custody in Pristina, Kosovo, after a months-long investigation by the Kosovar and Macedonian authorities, with the support of Europol and Eurojust.

An enforcement operation on Sunday (August 4), which involved simultaneous searches at several locations in North Macedonia, led to his detention as well as the seizure of machines for the production of counterfeit currency, along with thousands of assembled coins, rings and core blanks.

In a statement, Europol said that the coins seized during the searches will be further examined, comparing them to other coins already withdrawn from circulation to evaluate the real scale of the production.

Last year, the Central Bank of the Republic of Kosovo issued a statement saying that Kosovo was facing an epidemic of counterfeit coins worth millions of euros, with €2 coins found circulating in large quantities. While it is not part of the EU, Kosovo adopted the euro as its currency in 2002 in cooperation with the European Central Bank (ECB) and national banks in the eurozone.

At the time, it said that the counterfeit coins had different magnetic properties from genuine coins, and had "poor quality of detail," particularly with regard to the colours of the ring and core, and lacked the letters stamped on the edge.

Figures from the EU's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs showed that between 2014 and 2018 annual detections of counterfeit euro coins in or before circulation fell from around 500,000 to less than 200,000, suggesting it was a relatively minor problem. Over that period the €2 coin was the most prone to counterfeiting, but fake 50 cent and €1 coins were also found in smaller quantities.

Overall, the responsibility for coinage lies with national central banks. Earlier this year, Germany's Bundesbank said it was seeing a spike in counterfeit coins, with just under 116,000  coins seized in 2023 versus a little over 73,000 the prior year, although it suggested that was in part because some companies had accumulated coins that they suspected of being counterfeits over several years and then submitted them to the bank as a batch.

Last year, Italian police assisted by Europol dismantled what they described as an organised crime syndicate involved in counterfeiting euro coins and arrested four individuals accused of distributing the fakes in several EU countries, mainly France, Germany, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain, as well as in Switzerland.