More than 25,000 forged euro bank notes were withdrawn from circulation in Belgium last year, it emerged on Monday from figures produced by the National Bank.
The quantity is on the decline in comparison with 2018, when 30,000 forgeries were confiscated.
A total of 25,217 fake euro notes amounting to the fictitious sum of about 1.27 million euro were taken out of circulation in 2019.
These figures could in any case grow a bit larger as the police are still likely to add notes seized over the course of the year to the total, Geert Sciot, the National Banks spokesman, added.
The most copied notes are in 50 and 20 euro denominations, with 13,409 orange notes (53%) and 7,178 blue (28%) being seized in 2019.
The number of forgeries reported in Belgium has been going down since 2016. "This is explained notably by the fact that euro bank notes are increasingly better protected against counterfeiting, making them ever more difficult to falsify," Sciot explained.
The chances of landing up with a forgery in hand are therefore not very great. In the Euro zone, it is estimated that the number of fake notes per million in circulation is 24.
The Brussels Times
