Prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases (PCCOCS), together with officers from the National Investigation Inspectorate (INI) of the Police, detained a man from Balti after he put counterfeit US dollars into circulation in December 2022-January 2023 from the 130,000 counterfeit dollars brought into the country from Turkey.

According to the PCCOCS, following the searches, law enforcement officers seized 117,000 counterfeit dollars from the suspect for attachment to the criminal case file as a corpus delicti.

“The 47-year-old suspect was detained on Monday in Sangerei. The arrest took place after he was stopped from travelling from Balti to Chisinau, where he was going to make purchases with the counterfeit money.

According to preliminary data, the suspect brought the counterfeit money to Moldova from Turkey in December 2022. The suspect took the money from the leader of the criminal group who entrusted it to him in the foreign state in order to put it into circulation. Last November, the leader had been detained by Bulgarian authorities at the Turkish border when he tried to smuggle $70,000 in counterfeit currency into the country, disguised in the floor of a vehicle. The investigating authorities are also aware of the involvement of other members of the criminal group, who are to be identified and prosecuted,” PCCOCS said.

PCCOCS prosecutors are to investigate “the evidence of the suspect’s involvement in the criminal scheme, in order to determine the necessity of applying preventive detention to him, during which time he is presumed innocent, according to the law”.