In Porto, on Rua do Almada, someone found an abandoned suitcase containing 7,350 counterfeit €200 notes. Their total face value was €1.47 million. That is more than the amount of counterfeit money seized by police in the whole of last year.
A local resident spotted the suitcase next to the recycling containers — so someone had essentially dropped one and a half million euros off for recycling. At first, the passer-by assumed a tourist had left their luggage behind: Baixa is always packed with visitors. The suitcase stayed there. The tourist did not come back. So the man stopped a tourist police patrol, and at 5:15 p.m. officers opened the luggage. Inside were bundles of badly made €200 notes. The counterfeits were immediately obvious.
The owner was not found. The working theory is that whoever left the suitcase got scared about being caught with that much cash and simply walked away. Poor guy. Cash in Portugal is already often a source of questions, especially large-denomination notes. Even a €100 note at a supermarket can make the cashier’s eyes go wide. And trying to spend a €200 note in Portugal is extremely difficult — I say this as someone who once had the misfortune of bringing enough of them into the country to cause a serious headache (no, the suitcase wasn’t mine).
So the counterfeiter picked the hardest denomination to spend, printed it badly, made 7,350 of them and left the suitcase next to a recycling bin. The business didn’t exactly take off. Friends, don’t draw €200 notes. It’s a doomed enterprise. Real ones are hard enough to spend, let alone the homemade kind.
