An employee of North Macedonia’s interior ministry has been arrested in Kosovo’s capital Pristina for the mass production of fake €2coins, Europol said in a statement. The 34-year-old employee allegedly has produced over 2mn fake coins.

Kosovo, which adopted the euro as its currency in 2002 despite not yet being an EU member, has been facing an epidemic of counterfeit coins worth millions of euros.

Europol also said that several locations were searched simultaneously in North Macedonia, where the authorities seized machines for the production of fake coins, thousands of assembled coins, rings and core blanks.

“Authorities were alerted to the suspect’s activities through a coordinated intelligence-sharing effort,” it said.

Kosovo and North Macedonia have established a joint investigation team at Eurojust with the support of the Western Balkans Criminal Justice Project.

The investigation was backed by all related institutions in the two countries, while Europol has provided critical intelligence analysis, operational coordination, and technical assistance.

“The coins seized during the searches will be further examined, comparing them to other coins already withdrawn from circulation to evaluate the real scale of the production,” Europol said.

Both Kosovo and fellow former Yugoslav nation Montenegro have adopted the euro as their currency, despite not having a formal agreement to do so. This is in contrast to other locations such as the Principalities of Monaco and Andorra that have concluded monetary agreements with the EU on the use of the euro. 

The unilateral adoption of the euro stems from the two countries’ relatively recent independence — declared by Montenegro in 2006 and Kosovo in 2008 — after the wars that fractured Yugoslavia in the 1990s. 

Kosovars initially used the German Deutschmark when the country de facto split from Serbia after the war of independence and Nato bombardment of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999. In September 1999 the UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) approved the use of Deutschmarks and other foreign currencies, and the people of Kosovo spontaneously adopted the Deutschmark as their currency.

In 2002, when the euro was introduced, Kosovo replaced the Deutschmark with the new European single currency. According to the central bank in Pristina, while Kosovo was not formally a member of the eurozone, adoption of the euro involved collaboration with the ECB and Eurozone national central banks, and around 100mn euros were dispersed before January 1, 2002.

However, the use of the euro in the two countries has not been without controversy, including a scandal related to counterfeit €2 coins that Reuters revealed in 2023 were widely circulated in Kosovo. So many fake €2 coins flooded the country that they are now accepted unchallenged by retailers and service providers.