Agents of the National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra have dismantled, in an operation coordinated by Europol, an international criminal organization of Pakistani origin dedicated to the production and distribution of counterfeit 100 euro banknotes and have arrested 14 people in Barcelona, ??Rome and Naples, among them, the most responsible.
As reported this Saturday by the National Police in a statement, the criminal organization would have manufactured and introduced into the economic circuit the sum of one million euros distributed mainly in Italy, France, Greece and Spain.
Specifically, the clandestine printing press that has been dismantled operated in Naples and later in Rome, and produced banknotes with “a very high quality, even circumventing the majority of automatic payment machines,” said the National Police.
The investigation began in November 2023 when a large number of counterfeit 100 euro bills were detected in Barcelona in circulation in shops. From then on, investigators managed to identify the distributors and “placers” of the counterfeits who operated in Barcelona and realized that they were people of Pakistani origin.
Through Europol, it was learned that the monetary ‘Commando Antifalsificazione’ of Rome, of the Carabinieri body, had an open investigation since January 2023 against a criminal organization of Pakistani citizens, based in Naples and Rome, which manufactured and distributed these same 100 euro bills, having expanded its area of ??influence to different countries in Europe.
The distribution cell was in charge of taking large quantities of counterfeit banknotes to the different itinerant placement cells, among which was the cell detected in Barcelona that resided in two homes in the Eixample neighborhood.
They also supplied other placement cells located in Italy (Bologna, Brescia, Cremona, Cosenza, Florence, Foggia, Lecce, Milan, Novara, Pistoia, Reggio Emilia, Verona, Vicenza,) and abroad (Paris, Nice, Marseille and Athens).
This placement cell detected in Barcelona operated throughout the city making small purchases in establishments that had electronic payment machines. Once they introduced the counterfeit bill, they took the change that the machines gave them and the purchased product, as highlighted. the National Police.
In addition, the investigators twice intercepted the counterfeit bills that the distribution cell intended to send them, arresting the distributors at the Prat airport and at the Nord bus station in Barcelona, ??seizing 70,000 counterfeit euros in 100-euro bills. .
