Three suspects have been arrested and two others are under investigation in Prato for a sophisticated counterfeiting operation involving 2-euro coins, minted with components manufactured in China and clandestinely cleared through customs in other European countries.

20,000 counterfeit coins have been seized in the Tuscan city since November 2025, found – this is the ploy to "transform" them into real money – inside the cash registers of coin-changing machines in slot machine and video lottery halls.

The suspects are all Chinese, and the prosecutor's office has issued arrest warrants for three of them, who are seriously suspected of the crime, due to their risk of fleeing.

Investigations by the Italian State Mint have revealed that this is an "innovative and extremely insidious class of counterfeiting," the prosecutor's office explains, "evidently designed to be inserted into coin change machines to obtain real banknotes."

The counterfeiters used "rings" and "inners" (the central golden rings and plates of the bimetallic 2 euro coin) manufactured in China, imported in quantities of at least one ton, and managed to obtain all the "security features of genuine coins (weight, size and perfectly barycentric magnetism)" in order to effectively pollute the money market.

The investigation was conducted by the Carabinieri, who arrested the 47-year-old gang leader and two accomplices, aged 37 and 51.

Two clandestine mints were discovered in the countryside near Quarrata (Pistoia) and on Via Paoli in Prato. Counterfeiters had managed to mint the obverses of Italian coins (including one commemorating the founding of the Italian Air Force), French coins (commemorating the Rugby World Cup), German coins (including the 30th anniversary of the EU flag), as well as coins from Slovenia, Greece, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

(Unioneonline)

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