MUMBAI: A man who arrived on a flight from Dubai on Sunday morning was arrested for carrying fake Rs 2,000 notes with a face value of almost Rs 24 lakh. The notes were of high quality, incorporating seven of nine security features.
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The accused told the police that they were printed in Pakistan and sent to Dubai, with India intended as the final destination. The denomination, when issued in 2016, was touted as highly secure, but RBI said in October that no Rs 2,000 note was printed in 2019 as NIA had found high-quality fakes.
The passenger, Javed Shaikh (36), a Kalwa resident, had been to Dubai and Bangkok in the past and may have brought in many such consignments. Police are questioning him about who the present consignment was meant for.
“An average person will not be able to identify the fake notes. Shaikh walked away at the airport’s security check. He was caught at the bus stop outside the international terminal,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (crime) Santosh Rastogi, who did not rule out a terror link. He said Shaikh was caught because of a CIA tipoff.
“The counterfeit currency was smartly stuffed in one of his trolley bags. The notes were scattered inside a cushion, which was stuffed into a gap between the bag’s wall and a cloth liner. It took us over an hour to locate the money,” Rastogi said.
“A scanner identifies notes if they are kept in bundles. It’s the edges of the bundles that get detected. As opposed to this, Shaikh was carrying the notes in a scattered format, making machine detection difficult,” Rastogi said.
On the quality of the notes, a crime branch officer said that the two security features that weren’t copied properly were ‘optically variable ink’ (ink that changes colour with changing angles) and ‘see-through register’ (hidden features that are seen only if a note is held against light).
V Narayan for Times of India
Read the exclusive GreatGameIndia story that led to a major national controversy exposing the role of British Crown firm DeLaRue in printing of fake Indian currency notes. GGI itself received a notice from the advisory firm Brunswick on behalf of DeLaRue regarding the story.
As a direct impact of GreatGameIndia reporting the Government Security Paper Mill (SPM) in Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh, has filed a recovery suit of Rs 11 crore against UK-headquartered banknote manufacture De La Rue for allegedly supplying substandard paper for printing currency notes.
Through RTI we found that still DeLaRue is involved in the printing of Indian currency notes. The questions that nobody has raised yet and that needs to be answered are these. How could a blacklisted and banned British company be given the sensitive job of printing our currency notes? Is DeLaRue still blacklisted or not? If yes, than who lifted the ban? If no, than why DeLaRue is still involved in printing our notes?
Understand India’s Demonetization from a Geoeconomic perspective through our exclusive Global War on Cash issue and explained in detail with a historical backdrop along with Black Money calculations in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance.
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