Hyderabad: Armed with a tip-off, Korutla circle inspector K. Rajashekhar Rao and his team lay in wait on the Metpally road in Karimnagar district, on February 11.
As a red car approached, they barricaded the road and stopped the vehicle. Police asked the three men inside to get out and searched the vehicle. Their information was not wrong: They found Rs 2.3 lakh worth fake currency notes concealed in the car. Police arrested the three men, and nabbed another person a few hours later.
The fake currency notes were of high quality and printed in Bangladesh. The notes were smuggled to Malda in West Bengal and spread from there to the villages.
“Two of the gang members, T. Kishan and G. Bhubaneswar, had visited Malda at least thrice in the last few months. They drove to Vizag in the car, parked it at the railway station, went to Kolkata by train and took a bus to Malda, where their sources handed them the fake notes,” said Mr Rajashekhar Rao.
After their earlier trips, the gang spent the fake money in local shops, where unsuspecting shopkeepers and villagers never spotted the cleverly printed fakes. “They spent the money in kirana shops, cool drink kiosks and other places. It was only when the notes were taken to a bank did someone notice that they were counterfeit,” Mr Rajashekhar Rao said.
Before that, bank officials at Metpally found Rs 8,000 in counterfeit currency with a depositor. Following police investigation, 25 people were arrested. A large amount of fake notes smuggled from Malda is already in circulation.
This is common in many villages and small towns across Telangana state.
At Matwada in Warangal, police arrested Armed Reserve constable Galli Sudhakar and a woman, S. Rajitha, who had with them a few lakhs in fake currency.
The duo later confessed they had travelled to Malda and had smuggled in the cash. Police in Sadasivpet in Medak, Mominpet in Ranga Reddy, places in Adilabad and Nalgonda have carried out similar counterfeit busts in the last two years.
Last week, the Ranga Reddy police arrested two persons at Mominpet with fake notes. One of them confessed that he had been visiting Malda for four years. Meghavath Prakash had circulated the fake notes elsewhere in the state before coming to Ranga Reddy district.
Gangs based in Malda either use their own agents or local agents from Telangana to pump the fake currency into semi-urban and rural areas where law enforcement is comparatively weaker than in the cities.
Police officials say this is one reason that the Malda rackets encourage agents from rural areas and small towns. Apart from fake Rs1,000 and Rs 500 notes, lower denomination counterfiet notes have also been smuggled into many villages.
