Law enforcement officials issued a warning on Thursday about counterfeit € 200 bills that have been found in the states of North-Rhine Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Hesse. Officials said the bills had been produced on a copying machine and lacked a black thread that is added to the real bills as a security measure. (AP)

[EuroTracer's Comment: The counterfeits are said to have appeared since February 2002, mostly in North-Rhine Westphalia with 70 cases. They not only lack the black thread, but also the water mark, depicting the architecture motif and the figure 200, left on the front side of the note (s. this picture).

In its report "Evaluation of the 2002 Cash Changeover" of April 2002 (2 MB pdf-file), the European Central Bank mentions on page 39:
On 4 March 2002, a total of 1,485 counterfeit euro banknotes were reported by the national analysis centres (NACs) as having been received between 1 January and 28 February 2002. (As reporting by the NACs is still irregular, it is possible that the final data for end-February 2002 will be slightly different.) All counterfeits reported are "local classes" and can be considered as "casual", i.e., counterfeits produced on PCs, scanners and printers of the 'domestic' variety and of very poor quality.

In an article on 2002-01-16, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported the following:
A Bad Year for Fake Notes
Frankfurt. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, reported on Wednesday that at least 29,464 counterfeit deutsche mark banknotes were discovered during the last year before the currency was retired, a 42 percent increase over 2000. However, a spokesman said he did not believe there was a "boom in counterfeit money," and that the numbers were in synch with 1990s averages. (AFP)]

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