On August 4 police seized 135 million pesos (about US$75,000) in a suburb outside Medellin, Colombia.
According to El Tiempo, the fraudulent funds were found in a counterfeiting lab in Bello, in the province of Antioquia. The workshop was in the process of producing another 225 million pesos (about $125,775), police say. No arrests were made at the scene.
This is one of the biggest seizures of counterfeit bills since police confiscated $2.5 million in Cali in March. The southwest city is something like Colombia's counterfeit capital, where many skilled forgers honed their trade working for the Cali Cartel.·
Aside from producing fake pesos, Colombia has long been the world's top producer of counterfeit dollars. Traffickers empplyed the networks used for drug trafficking to transport fake cash from Central America to the U.S. As InSight Crime has noted, both left-wing guerrilla groups and drug gangs have been known to use counterfeit currency to fund their operations.
InSight Crime has been the victim of counterfeit 50,000 pesos bills in Medellin many a time. One handy tip is to swipe the bill across a white piece of paper. If ink comes off, then it's real.
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