The Mossos d’Esquadra and the National Police have dismantled a family clan and have arrested four people who manufactured fake currency of 10, 20 and 50 euros. They allegedly came to introduce €100,000 in establishments. The counterfeit bills were allegedly made at the homes of those investigated, where they were manufactured by hand and in small quantities, to hinder the investigation. The method of introduction was the drip system. They always had a small number of bills and went to small shops, preferably in places on the Catalan coast in the demarcations of tarragona and Barcelona, where they did not have electronic systems to detect counterfeit bills. They made small purchases. This group was already investigated and dismantled in 2018.
The investigation began at the beginning of the year, following the detection of a large number of counterfeit banknotes in the financial circuit that presented common counterfeit elements. The agents focused on a group that lived in Barcelona and Badalona and that had been investigated by the Mossos in 2018. As a result of that case, supervised by the National Court, the group was already dismantled and there were several detainees, some of whom they are in prison.
Now, those investigated would have manufactured and introduced more than 5,600 counterfeit bills, which together totaled an amount of about 100,000 euros, despite the fact that it is not ruled out that more bills that are still in circulation will be intervened in the future.
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He March 30th, the agents carried out three searches, two in Barcelona’s Eixample and one in Badalona, and arrested four people, including the printer and ticket distributors. In the residence of Badalona intervened the laboratory for printing banknotes, with a multifunction equipment, a silver-grey pencil to imitate the holographic bands of banknotes, folio-type paper to print banknotes, various photocopied folio banknotes and five finished 20-euro banknotes.
The detainees, three men and a woman between the ages of 18 and 51, went to court at the investigating court number 4 in Badalona on Friday. Two of them have entered prison and the other two have been released with charges. They are attributed crimes of currency counterfeiting.