Italian police said on Wednesday they had seized €7mn ($7.7mn) in fake banknotes and arrested three men who were caught printing copies of the new-style €20 bill, introduced last year with added security to deter counterfeiters.
Three Italian men had set up a sophisticated printing operation in an apartment outside Naples, in southern Italy, which was raided on Tuesday when production was in full swing, finance police said in a statement.
"This is the first print shop of the new €20 series we've discovered," Lieutenant Colonel Guglielmo Sanicola said.
"The fake bills don't need to be perfect, just good enough to trick the average consumer. And these were very high quality," he told Reuters.
The new version of the €20 note began circulating across the euro zone at the end of November, including a transparent hologram that reveals a portrait of Europa, a figure from Greek mythology.
Until then, the 20 had been the most frequent target for counterfeiters: more than 46% of the fakes withdrawn from circulation in the second half of last year were €20 notes, according to European Central Bank statistics.
Sanicola said the knock-offs discovered by the police included a cut-out for the Europa hologram.
After uncovering the printing operation and some €500,000 in fake €20 notes, finance police searched the properties of the three men arrested and found a stash of 6.5mn in fake €20, €50 and €100 bills.
The area around Naples, Italy's third-largest city, is a hotbed for euro counterfeiters. Multiple seizures of millions of euros in fake bills have been made there in the past two years, including more than €50mn of fake €50 notes in January last year.