In Kosovo, the ubiquity and quality of counterfeit €2 coins has led baristas in local cafes to give up on trying to check them for authenticity, since the majority they receive are fake, and the quality of the counterfeits is so high it is nearly impossible to distinguish the real coins from the fakes.

A cafe waiter in Pristina said to a Reuters reporter, “At the beginning, everyone was worried and was checking if the €2 coins were fake or not,” explaining they were holding them up to the light and dropping them on a surface to listen to the sounds that they make.

However he added, “Now we don’t check anymore … we may be taking fake money or may be giving out fake money. It is all the same.”

Law enforcement agencies note that the numbers of counterfeit €2 coins in circulation has grown dramatically this year.

Even though they are not part of the Eurozone, the euro is used extensively in both Kosovo and in the neighboring Montenegro.

One shopkeeper who chose to remain anonymous told Reuters that of the 11 €2 coins in her cash register, six turned out to be fakes. She added that the fakes are so commonly used everywhere that she had no choice but to accept them.

During the first half of this year, experts at the police forensics laboratory in Pristina have examined more that 30,000 fake €2 coins. In all of 2022, they examined only 4,451 fake coins.

An expert on counterfeit money at the lab, Vjollca Mavriqi, said to the agency, “Before, the fake coins were not magnetic and now they are, before they had issues with weight but now they match the genuine ones.”

In 2022, local police delivered 804 cases related to the forgery of money to prosecutors, while so far this year, they have issued 486. In one case in April, a couple was arrested, when they were caught attempting to transport 10,600 counterfeit €2 coins over the border from North Macedonia into Kosovo.