After six years of investigation, in which agents of the National Police and Mossos d’Esquadra have been tying up the oversights that a secretive Chinese criminal organization was committing, the largest workshop for manufacturing fake two-euro coins in the last year has been dismantled. decade in Europe. Researchers estimate that they have been able to introduce nearly 500,000 high-quality counterfeits thanks to the clandestine workshop’s roaming around different corners of Spain: from an industrial estate in the industrial belt of Madrid to a town in Toledo that lives by manufacturing doors, passing through by a massage place in Barcelona. The police coup has resulted in ten arrests, among them a master blacksmith who achieved the perfection of the coins that have been introduced into the market for less than half their value.
The origin of the operation dates back to September 2018, when the Security Forces and Corps became aware of the existence of a criminal organization allegedly dedicated to the production and distribution of coins. During that month—and the next—almost 25,000 euros in fake two-euro coins were seized. The clues take him to a warehouse in an industrial estate in Fuenlabrada (Madrid), where the agents find remains of what could have been a manufacturing workshop. But they were late. They found the workshop dismantled, but they located elements of which the coins are composed – rings and cores – directly related to those intervened in previous months.
Now they know that the criminal organization had everything so meticulous that they never linked production with distribution, leaving considerable spaces for rest. Between both processes. That is, they counterfeited as many coins as possible for a time and before putting them into circulation they dismantled the workshop to make the work of the agents following in their footsteps more difficult. Commanders of the National Police and Mossos d’Esquadra who reported on the operation this Tuesday have highlighted the “extreme difficulties” that have been encountered along the way due to the secrecy of the group, the practically zero traceability that characterizes the counterfeit metallic currency and the high mobility of the manufacturing workshops.
And during the first months of 2020, after registering the Fuenlabrada ship, another consignment of almost 34.00 euros in coins of the same type was seized again. Mostly, the members of the gang went to gambling halls and casinos to insert them into slot machines that were not well calibrated. According to the researchers, they either inserted them themselves in large quantities and immediately asked the machine to return them – ejecting real coins from the slot machine – or sold them to gamblers for half their real value.
In 2021, a chance discovery serves to continue advancing the research. A Chinese citizen had rented a premises converted into a massage business to other compatriots years ago. But the pandemic arrived, the tenants returned to China and since they paid the rent in cash, the landlord had not seen a penny for months. So he went to the Mossos, who went to the ship to check that no one was left there. The surprise came when they located about 20 boxes of unminted two-euro coins, elements for their minting and a multitude of fake two-euro coins.
They were of the same type as those followed by the National Police, so the investigations overlapped. In the case of Catalonia, the head of the Central Counterfeit Currency Unit of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Sergi Sánchez, explained in a press conference that they were put into circulation through businesses in very touristy areas of Barcelona, ??serving to give the change to customers.
During the last three years, police surveillance and surveillance were carried out that did not bear fruit. The investigation was at a kind of stalemate due to the high level with which the organization, which is also related to human trafficking and drug trafficking, was taking extreme precautions. Until this very 2024, the Municipal Police of Madrid comes into play through a breathalyzer control. The agents stopped a vehicle containing three Chinese citizens who, after initial checks, showed “a restless and nervous behavior,” according to investigators. Something that motivated the registration.
In the trunk of the vehicle, the agents found a large quantity of two-euro coins distributed in 48 bags, each containing 300 units. The three were sent to provisional prison. The coins were analyzed by the National Analysis Center of the Bank of Spain, where it was determined that they had characteristics that corresponded to the elements used by the counterfeiters that the National Police and Mossos were looking for. This breathalyzer test served to see the light at the end of the investigation tunnel. Police efforts confirmed that the three arrested people regularly frequented the Toledo municipality of Villacañas.
There they had set up their last itinerant workshop without raising a single suspicion among the 10,000 residents of the town. Researchers have highlighted that the machines used by counterfeiters, despite being industrial, hardly made any noise. In the middle of this month, the agents searched the ship, intervening multiple dies to mint the coins, die holders, 29,000 cores to make counterfeit coins, two large hydraulic presses, three manual and electromechanical machines for die cutting. of the counterfeit coin cando, two precision scales, two compressors and a water pump.
