Saturday, April 2, 2011

6-million euro ($8.4 million) coin fraud

A picture illustration taken in Warsaw on January 18, 2011, shows a one euro coin. An airline stewardess struggling to lift her bag at a German airport led to the discovery of a 6-million euro ($8.4 million) coin fraud. The customs officer who stopped the stewardess in early 2010 found thousands of one and two euro coins in her bag, a newspaper reported on March 31, 2011. The incident sparked an investigation that has uncovered a forgery ring stretching to China and potentially implicating employees of German airline Lufthansa. The Frankfurt prosecutor's office carried out dawn raids on offices and residences and arrested six people who smuggled coins that had been taken out of circulation or bits of those coins into Germany from China, where they had been sent as scrap metal. The suspects then put the coins back together and exchanged them for a total of 6 million euros at the Bundesbank from 2007 to 2010, the prosecutors said.

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