By IANS,
Lucknow : Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials and sleuths of the Uttar Pradesh police in a Monday night raid unearthed fake notes in the currency chest of the State Bank of India at Domariyaganj near the border with Nepal.
The racket was exposed during a raid at the SBI currency chest, from where the cash for all the local branches are distributed.
A sum of about Rs.7 million has been found missing from the bank’s chest.
Additional Director General of Police Brij Lal said: “This racket has been thriving with the connivance of the bank staff, who were clearly found to be involved in clandestine replacement of notes with fake currency.”
“This was the first time that a public sector bank was found to have been used to systematically push counterfeit currency into the open market,” he said.
The scam has its roots in last week’s arrest of four people with wads of fake currency notes in Domariyaganj town close to the Indo-Nepal border.
“Sustained interrogation of Abid Sheikh alias Pundit, who was among the arrested, gave us leads to SBI bank cashier Sudhakar Tripathi from whose residence we discovered Rs.700,000 cash,” Lal told IANS
However, the cops found only Rs.5,000 of these Rs.700,000 to be fake.
The police then urged RBI higher-ups to scan the currency chests of different banks, particularly in the towns bordering Nepal, from where most of the counterfeit currency was believed to be routed.
More raids are expected to be carried out in other banks shortly.