Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins
In Spain, the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins was dismantled; according to authorities it was the largest counterfeiting workshop in Europe.
Official officials had been after the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins for about six years.
The gang was dedicated to counterfeiting “anything that produces large amounts of money”.
In this case, the National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra have dismantled the largest 2-euro coin manufacturing workshop in all of Europe in the last decade and the largest ever seen in our country.
The laboratory of the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins was hidden in a small industrial shed located in the municipality of Villacañas, Toledo, with a population of only 9,500 inhabitants.
Nobody had noticed the work of the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins.
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Operation Double Star, which began back in 2018, has resulted in a total of 10 detainees, of whom three remain in pre-trial detention.
One of the investigators has defined them as “masters” of coin craftsmanship, although their production reached industrial levels.
The agents estimate that the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins could manufacture a thousand copies of 2-euro coins a day with the machines they had at their disposal.
Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins
Before being discovered by the Police, the organization of Chinese origin had managed to introduce up to 100,000 counterfeit coins in the Spanish market and about 400,000 in the rest of Europe, which raises the amount of money laundered to one million euros.
The specimens were “of high quality” and went “unnoticed” in the eyes of someone inexperienced in the matter. Also for the slot machines or the gambling halls, where the investigated obtained a good part of their fortune by exchanging the counterfeit coins for legal ones.
The head of the National Police station attached to the Bank of Spain, José María Jiménez, and the head of the Provincial Alien Brigade of Madrid, Víctor de las Heras, have highlighted the “extreme difficulty” of the investigation due to the “secrecy” of the organization of Chinese nationals.
Its members knew they were under investigation and did not hesitate to change their center of production every time they introduced a consignment of coins in legal tender.
In Villacañas, the last production point of the Chinese mafia that counterfeited euro coins, no neighbor had heard the industrial machines or detected the strange presence of the mafia.
The Police began to follow in the footsteps of the organization in 2018. At the police station attached to the Bank of Spain when they seized almost 25,000 euros in fake 2-euro coins, all of the same type baptized as “Class 92″.
Months later, in 2019, the investigations led the agents to the Cobo Calleja industrial park in Fuenlabrada (Madrid), the nerve center of Chinese trade in the region. However, they found nothing beyond the “raw material” with which they were already producing the counterfeit coins, or so the investigators now believe.
In this cat-and-mouse game, the organization moved to Catalonia, specifically to Barcelona and Badalona.
There, by chance, the Mossos found dozens of boxes with unminted metal discs in a massage parlor rented to Chinese nationals.
In addition, last March the Municipal Police of Madrid, in a breathalyzer control, discovered almost 15,000 fake 2 euro coins in the car of three Chinese men. This was the last clue that led them to Villacañas.
