Anatasios Arnaouti

Who is Anatasios Arnaouti?

Anatasios Arnaouti is a criminal from Manchester, England who led one of the most ambitious ever forgery operations before being jailed in 2005.

At the time of the arrest of Arnaouti and his accomplices, police seized over £2.5million worth of counterfeit £10 notes and $3.5 million worth of counterfeit $100 notes, 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 U.S. economies.

In Operation Gait, the UK National Crime Squad working jointly with the US Secret Service infiltrated and uncovered the operation in December 2002. Simultaneously a BBC undercover documentary team also infiltrated the operation and secretly filmed the printing presses in operation, providing information on the gangs' distribution methods which the police had not uncovered. Although the notes produced by the gang were not perfect, the gangs' 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.