The number of flowers increases again.

Counterfeiters have benefited from the end of most corona restrictions over the past year.

In Germany, the police, trade and banks pulled almost 44,150 counterfeit euro banknotes from circulation, as the Deutsche Bundesbank announced on Monday.

That was at least 5.2 percent more than in the previous year.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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The Bundesbank blames the return of cash in business life, among other things.

"This is probably due to the fact that the corona restrictions of the two previous years were largely lifted and folk festivals or Christmas markets took place again, where most of the payments were made in cash," said Burkhard Balz, the member of the Bundesbank board responsible for cash.

"Overall, however, the volume of counterfeit money remains very low: In purely mathematical terms, there were only five counterfeit banknotes per 10,000 inhabitants in 2022."

The number of counterfeit coins discovered also increased: in 2022, around 73,400 counterfeit coins were detected in German payment transactions.

In 2021 it was 41,100 coins.

In purely mathematical terms, this means that around nine counterfeit coins per 10,000 inhabitants per year were generated in Germany.

The most common counterfeiting of 2 euro coins was 89 percent.

The enormous increase is said to have been mainly due to a number of special cases in which companies had collected suspect coins for years and submitted them to the Bundesbank in 2022.

Watches and cars paid for with counterfeit money

The calculated damage as a result of counterfeit money rose from 1.9 million euros in 2021 to 2.7 million euros.

According to the Bundesbank, this was mainly due to the fact that in several cases watches and cars were paid for with counterfeit 100 and 200 euro banknotes.

The 20 and 50 euro notes, which together accounted for 69 percent of all counterfeit notes discovered in Germany, are particularly popular with criminals.

In Europe as a whole, the number of euro blossoms seized last year rose by 8.4 percent to 376,000.

The loss volume increased year-on-year from EUR 17.5 million to EUR 21.5 million.

"Movie Money" is easily recognizable

For some time now, criminals have also been using easily recognizable printed forgeries that are offered on the Internet as play money or film props with the inscription “Movie Money” or “Prop copy”.

The proportion of such notes in the flowers seized in Germany fell from 22 percent to 17 percent.

“The issue has now reached the retail trade, but at the same time the pressure from the law enforcement authorities is increasing.

Placing Movie Money on the market can be a criminal offense,” explained Balz.

Counterfeit money will not be replaced.

Cash payments had fallen sharply during the pandemic.

After that, things changed a bit, without the fundamental trend towards cashless payments changing.

During the corona pandemic, the number of crimes involving counterfeit money in Germany had fallen.

The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) still counts 38,234 offenses in its “Federal situation report for counterfeit money crime 2021”.

According to the Wiesbaden authority, that was 16.7 percent less than a year earlier.