NIA recovers 'high quality' fake notes of Rs 2000, West Bengal man held

New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday recovered 3 fake, but ‘high quality’ currency notes of Rs 2000 denomination, and arrested a native of Malda in West Bengal.

According to reports, a senior NIA official said, “Following the introduction of new currency notes of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500, there have been around half a dozen cases where fake currency notes in the denomination of Rs 2,000 were recovered but their quality of far inferior. Most of them were just scanned copy of the note. But the recovery made on Tuesday by our investigators appears to be of high quality”.

Umar Faruq, a man from West Bengal, who was accused in a case of Fake India Currency Notes (FICN) smuggling, has been arrested.

Faruq was on his way to hand over the samples of the fake Rs 2,000 notes to another FICN racketeer when he was picked up, said the report.

Security features of the new Rs 2000 notes seem to have been imitated to create the counterfeit currency. The notes have been sent for forensic examination, the report said.

The West Bengal police have also registered a case in connection with a recovery of 40 fake Rs 2000 notes, made by the BSF at the Indo-Bangladesh border earlier this year. However, the quality of the notes seized on Tuesday appears better than that of ones recovered by Bengal police, said the report quoting an official.

The NIA takes up probe of only those cases where the recovered fake currency is of high quality, and thus was not involved in any earlier cases of seized fake notes of Rs 2000.

The Modi has argued that smuggling of the FICN from across the border was one of the reasons of demonetisation of old currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 on November 8 last year