Friends, please go through this report published in TOI and be careful while dealing with high denomination notes.

Watch out, you may be holding a fake Rs 500 note

Around Rs 1,69,000 crore of fake money is in the system. And it's growing. TOI looks into the growing threat.

* Last month when Maharashtra Crime Branch and Anti-terrorism Squad sleuths caught six persons with counterfeit currency worth over Rs 9 lakh, they themselves couldn't make out the difference between the fake and genuine notes. "They have 95% features of genuine notes," says an official. The provisions of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) have been invoked -- for the first time against fake currency.

* Zahoor Ahmad Mir of Rawalpora, Srinagar, withdrew Rs 2,000 from an ATM. He was told by a shopkeeper after his weekend shopping that the currency was fake. A frantic Zahoor rushed to the bank, the ATM of which had coughed up the 500-rupee notes. "But the bank officials refused to accept it. They suspected I had got the fake note from somewhere else," he says.

The proliferation of fake Rs 500 notes has just got bigger. You never know when you are holding one — or more. Even ATMs are disgorging them, indicating the counterfiets are so good that bankers are failing to detect them. Despite measures taken by RBI, the home ministry and intelligence agencies, the fear of the fake has grown — from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Gujarat to Assam.

Officials say there's a high volume of fake notes of Rs 100, Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 in the market, and that they have had limited success so far in controlling their spread. The Naik Committee, set up to assess the menace of fake currency, says counterfeit money in the range of Rs 1,69,000 crore is sloshing around the system. And just a tiny fraction of it has been seized: Rs 63 crore.

Both the government and common people are aware of the problem, but feel ill equipped to deal with it.

"The extent of the problem can be gauged from the huge gap between actual seizures and circulation of fake Indian currency notes (FICN). Although several steps have been taken by the finance ministry and RBI, weeding out FICNs may take long," says a senior home ministry official.

Experienced shop-keepers feel the texture of the note, particularly when it's of a large denomination, and hold it under lights to see the water-mark. However, if this year's three major seizures — amounting to over Rs 35 lakh — in UP and Maharashtra are any indication, it's the quality of FICN that has alarmed the security agencies. The paper, say intelligence sleuths, is almost identical to the original, which makes their identification very tough.

Source: TOI