Anatasios Arnaouti (born 21 July 1967) is a

criminal In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Can ...

from

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, who led an ambitious

forgery Forgery is a white-collar crime that generally refers to the false making or material alteration of a legal instrument with the specific intent to defraud anyone (other than themself). Tampering with a certain legal instrument may be forbidd ...

operation before being jailed in 2005. At the time of the arrest of Arnaouti and his accomplices, police seized over £2.5 million worth of

counterfeit To counterfeit means to imitate something authentic, with the intent to steal, destroy, or replace the original, for use in illegal transactions, or otherwise to deceive individuals into believing that the fake is of equal or greater value tha ...

£10 notes and $3.5 million worth of counterfeit US$100 notes categorized as

superdollar A superdollar (also known as a superbill or supernote) is a very high quality counterfeit United States one hundred-dollar bill, alleged by the U.S. government to have been made by unknown organizations or governments. In 2011, government sources ...

s, but the total number of notes produced is unknown as their printing operation had been in production for several years. The accomplice with printing skills, Philip Raynor, admitted to printing 350,000 $100 bills and 250,000 £10 notes over 18 months. The gang were using equipment capable of printing £1 million per day, and boasted they were producing $500,000 in fake dollars a day. The extent of the crime was considered so severe that it could have compromised the UK and US economies. In ''Operation Gait'', the UK

National Crime Squad The National Crime Squad (NCS) was a British police organisation which dealt with national and transnational organised and major crimes. Formed in April 1998 after the amalgamation of six former Regional Crime Squads, it merged with parts of H ...

—working jointly with the

US Secret Service The United States Secret Service (USSS or Secret Service) is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security charged with conducting criminal investigations and protecting U.S. political leaders, their families, and ...

—infiltrated and uncovered the operation in December 2002. Simultaneously a

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

undercover documentary team also infiltrated the operation and secretly filmed the printing presses in operation, providing information on the gang’s distribution methods which the police had not uncovered. Although the notes produced by the gang were not perfect, the gang's principal difficulty was not in producing the notes but in getting them into circulation, leading the gang into carelessness in finding people to buy the counterfeits, which is how the BBC found the gang. On 14 June 2005, Arnaouti was sentenced to 8 years in prison for conspiracy to make counterfeit currency, conspiracy to pass counterfeit currency and conspiracy to handle stolen goods.

Footnotes

References

National Crime Squad press release
* * * * * 1967 births Living people Criminals from Manchester English counterfeiters {{UK-crime-bio-stub