In Portugal, five people have been arrested. They are said to be members of an international money counterfeiting band.
As Europol announced in The Hague, the alleged head of the gang, a Portuguese with numerous criminal records, was also arrested. He went to the investigators in Colombia in the network.
In France, Germany, Spain and Portugal, for example, fake banknotes worth more than € 1.3 million were secured, according to the European Union Police Department, which had coordinated the action.
It is the second largest counterfeiting network in the so-called Darknet, a part of the Internet used mainly for criminal activities. The gang has been active according to Europol since 2017 and is said to have faked more than 26,000 banknotes, mostly 50-euro bills.
The quality of the notes was according to the investigators "extremely high". Counterfeiters used security paper, holograms, watermarks and ultraviolet ink.