The single European currency is coming in just five months and while the general public hasn't given much thought to the changeover yet, you can bet your bottom euro the bad guys have.
Professional counterfeiters and money launderers are busy figuring out how to take advantage of phasing out 12 national currencies and replacing it with one -- the euro -- worth about US$0.87. Small-time crooks are working out inventive new ways to cheat the public. And even burglars and robbers are rubbing their hands.
At headquarters of Europol, the EU's police organization, the eurocops already are analyzing the activities of known counterfeiters, monitoring money flows from country to country and distributing regular situation reports to police departments and banks.
Fifty billion new coins and 14.5 billion banknotes worth 664 billion euros (US$578 billion) will be pumped into circulation on Jan. 1. Perhaps more difficult, an even larger amount of cash in 12 different currencies must be collected from around the world and returned to the central banks of each nation.
That leaves a lot of room for the bad guys to be creative.
According to Willy Bruggeman, Europol's chief investigator of euro scams, the crime begins with the simple crooks on the street and rises to multimillion dollar organized crime operations. Here are a few examples:
-- Already, there are reports of con men approaching old people and telling them if they change their money early, they will get a better rate. "It's not difficult to abuse the naivety of some people, especially elderly people," says Bruggeman.
-- Because bills now are stated in both local currency and euros, many scams are possible. A restaurant may present a bill for 6,000 Spanish pesetas (US$31) but charge a credit card for 6,000 euros (US$5,200).
-- Some currency exchange bureaus have rigged software that makes a very small error in calculation. Says Bruggeman: "Even when it's not big, at the end of the day or the end of the week, these guys are making a lot of profit."
To fight counterfeiters, the European Central Bank is holding off making public details of all the banknotes' features until the last minute. But perhaps as great as the fear of counterfeiting the new money is the problem of bogus old money.
"If I am a criminal, say in Moscow, and I have a lot of deutsche marks, 10,000 for example, why shouldn't I add 5,000 more counterfeit?" asked Bruggeman. "To collect and check all the currencies is a huge operation. Money has to be checked for counterfeit, that it is not dirty money, laundered money, tax evasion."
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