Police in Kosovo have found counterfeit currency worth more than 2 million euros in a car attempting to cross the border into neighboring Albania. Two suspects have been arrested.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Scholz
Advertisement
Police said a man from Cameroon and an Albanian citizen were taken into custody on Friday after officers seized a bag containing forged money from their car.
The cash included banknotes with denominations of 500, 200, 100 and 50 euros - adding up to a total face value of 2.1 million euros ($2.2 million).
The car also reportedly contained chemicals used for producing fake money, as well as thousands of sheets of paper.
In a statement, police said it was the biggest seizure of its kind since the end of the 1999 war in Kosovo.
Backed by the United States and major western European countries, the territory declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Since then, the government in Pristina has cracked down on organized crime and corruption in an effort to bring itself closer to European Union membership down the track. However, despite the presence of EU judiciary officials, NATO peacekeepers and police, smuggling remains a serious problem there.
nm/se (Reuters, AP)
From cotton to cash: how to (actually) make a euro
European Central Bank official Yves Mersch has unveiled a new 50 euro banknote to replace the eurozone's most widely counterfeited bill. DW looks at how euros are produced - and protected from counterfeiters.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/F. Rumpenhorst
From fluffy cotton to cold hard cash
Cotton is the euro banknote's base material. It handles stress better than the traditionally-used paper, which allows the bills to survive an accidental trip through the laundry machine. The textile industry sorts the cotton out into short threads before sending it off.
Image: tobias kromke/Fotolia
Secret recipe
The cotton is then bleached, washed and prepared into a pulp - whose exact formula is kept secret. A cylinder mould paper machine then turns the pulp into long strips of paper. By this point, the bills-to-be already contain a number of security features, such as watermarks and security threads.
Image: Giesecke & Devrient
Taking on the forgers...
The developers of the euro banknotes thought up more than ten different security features to make life tough for forgers. One involves a foil application, which is pressed onto the bill here in Germany at the private printers Giesecke & Devrient.
Image: Giesecke & Devrient
...while still geting took
Despite the elaborate printing procedure, counterfeiters still manage to bring hundreds of thousands of fake bills into circulation. Last year, more counterfeit euros were seized than in any year since the common currency's introduction in 2002. The ECB counts about 900,000 faked euro banknotes worldwide.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Hoppe
The artist (whose work you may own)
Reinhold Gerstetter is responsible for the design of the euro banknotes. Fans of the old Deutsche Mark may recognize his work - he drew the faces on their last edition, before Germany switched to the euro. Each bills is assigned an architectural epoch in European history, according to value, from an ancient archway on the five-euro-note to a steel bridge on the five-hundred-euro bill.
Image: Getty Images/AFP
Each and every note is unique
Each bill gets stamped with a unique number, which shows at which of the dozen high-security printers in Europe it was printed. The notes are then distributed among the different euro member states according to a determined ratio.
Image: Giesecke & Devrient
The true cost of 500 euros
The stacks of cash are bundled, shrink-wrapped and then sent to the central banks of member nations. A banknote costs between seven and 16 cents to produce, increasing with the value of the bill as they grow larger and more packed with more security features.
Image: Giesecke & Devrient
Cutting costs
Earlier, nations automatically commissioned their own domestic banknote producers. Now, Germany's Bundesbank for instance is open to giving assignments beyond its own borders. The competition creates cost pressure. Last year, the German printer Giesecke Devrient closed their location in Munich and laid off around 700 employees, as production is cheaper at its Leipzig and Malaysia shops.
Image: Giesecke & Devrient
In with the new!
In 2013, the five-euro-bill became the first of the newer, safer banknotes to be introduced. The 10-euro-note then entered circulation in 2015, followed by the 20-euro-note the year after. The new 50-year note is expected to make its appearance next year, with the 100- and 200-euro-notes coming in 2018. A new 500-euro-note is planned for 2019, but is expected to get nixed before then.
