Shravasti police have raided a madrassa where fake notes were being printed for at least a year. The mastermind behind the operation, madrassa manager Mubarak Ali, told police that he had learnt to print the fake currency on YouTube.
Notes totalling Rs 35,400 were recovered from the madrassa in Hardutnagar Girant area, based on leads received from five people that police had arrested earlier. They were in possession of fake notes, pistols and ammunition. This has been an ongoing police investigation and the police have had little success in the past.
In the operation on Wednesday evening, police recovered a printer, two laptops, four bottles of ink, a tablet that had three genuine notes fixed on them, five mobile phones and other paraphernalia used for printing fake currency. A countrymade firearm was also discovered.
Superintendent of Police Ghanshyam Chaurasia said that the police were investigating how far the network was spread. This recovery from Shravasti is important as it is located just 12 kilometres from the Nepal border.
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Initial investigations have yielded that Ali has five wives who were using the fake currency in local markets. One of these wives is a teacher in the madrassa. Ali has also told the police that he would scan genuine currency and then print notes from those scans.
A cursory search on YouTube does throw up ways to print fake currency. An internet search yields 14 easy steps to do the same. In June 2023, a gang from Shamli (western Uttar Pradesh) were caught with Rs 5.5 lakh of fake currency. The leader of the gang was a goldsmith who said that he had learnt how to print counterfeit currency from Farzi - an OTT series about fake currency.
According to data from the Ministry of Finance, in 2018-19, 21,865 million pieces (mpcs) of fake currency notes were detected. It reached its peak at 91,110 mpcs in 2022-23, before slightly declining to 85,711 mpcs in 2023-24.
