Let’s call it the Great Euro Escapade.
About a week ago, German police launched dawn raids on the homes and offices of six people, four of them Chinese, in and around Frankfurt, as authorities closed a net around conspirators in one of the boldest and strangest bank jobs ever.
According to German prosecutors, between 2007 and 2010, a ring of Chinese gangsters and flight attendants from the German airlines Lufthansa allegedly €6 million coin fraud. The gang is accused of reassembling 29 tons of scrapped euro coins sold to the Chinese as scrap metal, and then carrying the coins back to Germany and exchanging them for new ones at the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank.
The scam was discovered a year ago when one of the flight attendants, the only woman in the alleged ring, attracted the attention of border guards at a German airport as she struggled with her heavy luggage. A customs official searched her bag and found thousands of one and two-euro coins, sparking a year-long investigation that culminated in the arrests on March 30.
