The Border Security Force (BSF) Farakka seized 100 Rs 2000 fake currency notes from Malda’s Baisnabnagar Indo-Bangla border area on Wednesday morning. Within three months of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation move, fake Rs 2000 notes from the border entering India has certainly jolted the note-ban drive – these notes were touted as being really hard to copy due to the additional features added to them. In the many recent incidents – replicas of new Rs 2,000 notes have been seized and arrests have frequently made the headlines. A few days ago, in another seizure, a Pakistani link was established, in the current one the same is not clear yet.

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Officials said a Border Security Force search party laid a trap at about 2 am in a mango orchard in the Churiantpur areaand found a packet containing 100 Fake Indian Currency Notes(FICNs) of the face value of Rs 2,000, which were minted bythe government post the scrapping of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000currency notes last year.The BSF personnel challenged a suspected smuggler on theIndian side, who was set to receive the bundle from theBangladeshi side, but he “managed to escape taking advantageof 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 wereneatly packed in a polythene bag. This is the biggest seizure of fake new currency post demonetisation at this frontier,”officials said.
There have been seizures of one or two fake Rs 2,000 notes post the currency ban, but the quality of those was poor and they were possibly smuggled in to test the acceptability, they added.
The quality of the seized fake notes was found to be “good” as a preliminary examination detected that eight-ninefeatures, out of a total of 17, were copied even as the paperquality was found to be “not too good”, officials said.
The latest seizure was made on the basis of a tip-off from an FICN smuggler who was arrested yesterday, they added.
BSF and NIA, in a joint operation, arrested Umar Faruk (21) alias Firoz from the Golapganj area of Kaliachak in Maldayesterday and three fake currency notes of Rs 2,000 face valuewere seized from his possession.

To limit counterfeiting of currency was one of the main reasons for PM Modi’s bold move to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1000 on November 8 last year – fake money was being used to sponsor terrorism and harm the Indian financial system in a number of ways. It has now been witnessed that it has taken some 3 months for Pakistan-based counterfeiters to come out with fake Rs 2,000 notes. The money is being pumped into the country via the permeable India-Bangladesh border. The shocking details surfaced following arrests on Monday and seizures made by National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Border Security Force (BSF).

Also Read: With continuing fake-currency trade from Pakistan, here are the salient features to identify original Rs 2,000 & Rs 500 notes

Recently, A 26-year-old man, who hails from Malda in West Bengal, was arrested in Murshidabad for carrying 40 fake notes of Rs 2,000 denomination. During the interrogation, the accused revealed that fake notes had been printed in Pakistan, allegedly with the help of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). It has been learned that smugglers were required to pay Rs 400-600 in genuine currency for each fake Rs 2,000 note, depending on the quality.

As per the report, the first known attempt to smuggle fake currency was made in the last week of December 2016, when samples from across the border were sent for approval to smugglers in Malda. However, the first seizures of such fake notes were recorded on January 22 and on February 4, when Piyarul Sheikh (16) and Digamber Mondol (42), both from Kaliachak in Malda, were arrested by the local police and NIA.