India seeks global help to fight fake currency racket

India has called for international cooperation to tackle the problem of fake currency notes as a majority of consignments seized by its security agencies in the past couple of years had either originated abroad mainly in Pakistan, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and UAE or was controlled by somebody located in these countries.

The call was made at the 76th General Assembly of Interpol at Marrakesh, Morocco, by CBI director Vijay Shanker. While calling this problem a major threat to national security, he said that in the past decade, India had seen an unprecedented rise in counterfeit currency with Rs 8 crore in fake notes being seized the first 10 months of the year.

Without going into specifics, Shanker, an executive committee delegate at Interpol, said there was increasing evidence of sponsored counterfeiting with the objective of terrorist funding and promoting trans-national organised crime.

Referring to outside footprints in the racket, he said this trend had been corroborated by the fact that in the past one year, seizures outside India had been bigger and the counterfeiting was more sophisticated than domestic seizures.

Times of India