A government official from North Macedonia was arrested for allegedly mass-producing millions of fake €2 coins, the European Union’s law enforcement agency announced Tuesday.
A months-long investigation by Macedonian and Kosovar authorities, conducted with the support of the Europol agency, uncovered the apparent forgery operation and led to the 34-year-old suspect’s arrest in Pristina, Europol said in a statement.
The man was an employee at North Macedonia’s Ministry of Interior, Europol said, adding that authorities also seized “machines for the production of counterfeit currency, thousands of assembled coins, rings and core blanks” at multiple locations in North Macedonia.
Eurojust, the EU’s criminal justice cooperation agency, said in a statement that the man was “suspected of producing around 2 million fake EUR 2 coins, which were about to be circulated into the Kosovar economy.”
Kosovo is facing an epidemic of counterfeit coins worth millions of euros, according to authorities. The country is not part of the eurozone, the EU’s currency union, but adopted the euro as its currency in 2002.