Three months after the newly minted banknote was introduced as an upshot of the Narendra Modi government's demonetisation drive to fight corruption, fake notes are still a reality.
According to a PTI report, BSF seized 100 fake ₹2,000 currency notes from Malda district in West Bengal, making it the biggest such haul from the Indo-Bangla border region post demonetisation. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) too has seized fake notes.
But what is more scary is, you can't tell the fake from the real ones.
The NIA has raised concerns saying that the forgers are getting better at replicating security features of the new high-value notes.
The quality of the seized fake notes was found to be "good". Officials said that a preliminary examination detected that about nine features, out of a total of 17, were copied even as the paper quality was found to be "not too good".
"There have been around half-a-dozen cases in which fake ₹2,000 notes were recovered after the demonetisation exercise. But they were of inferior quality, mostly printouts of scanned copies of the note. But the recovery on Tuesday by our investigators appear to be of high quality," a senior NIA official told Hindustan Times.
A detailed forensic analysis has been ordered to check how many security features of the genuine currency have been replicated in the fake ones.
On Wednesday, the Border Security Force search party laid a trap at about 2 am in a mango orchard in the Churiantpur area and found a packet containing 100 Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICNs) of the face value of ₹2,000.
The BSF personnel challenged a suspected smuggler on the Indian side, who was set to receive the bundle from the Bangladeshi side, but he "managed to escape taking advantage of the darkness and thick growth in the orchard", they added.
"The packet, flung from across the border, landed in the orchard and it was recovered by the BSF team. The notes were neatly packed in a polythene bag. This is the biggest seizure of fake new currency post demonetisation at this frontier," officials said.
(With inputs from PTI)
Also see on HuffPost:
