Indian cops busted a relatively small cache of fake Indian currency in the Indian capital of Delhi, about half a million dollars worth. They blamed this on the Pakistani state naturally. People are used to the instant finger pointing in the direction of the north westerly neighbor by now, however, in this case the needle of suspicion really can't point elsewhere.
The scale isn't much, but the quality was something else. Experts took hours to tell apart fake from real. In effect it doesn't matter - the current design of Indian notes will need to be taken out of service - a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. To perfectly imitate currency of another country, any country in the world, I'd expect the investment shouldn't be more than a 100 million dollars, and yet the pay off can be worth billions and even hundreds of billions in economic damages. >From the news story: *"These notes have features that are known to only a few experts. The appearance and texture of the notes match Indian currency notes," DCP (Special Cell) Arun Kampani said. While cops are probing how these notes landed in Delhi from Jammu, the government and the RBI are thinking of new ways to stay ahead of counterfeiters. Officials said the forgery was near perfect and took experts long hours to identify each note. They are now probing how Pakistan-based counterfeiters got hold of such technology. The seized notes have all the six basic security features of Indian currency notes: a) micro-printing, which is used by RBI to combat counterfeiting; b) Gandhi watermark; c) security thread; d) 100% cotton paper; e) embossing by insertion of Intaglio images; and f) electro-yet watermark. "These features were believed to be impossible to copy. But counterfeiters have busted this myth," Kampani said. * http://m.timesofindia.com/city/delhi/RBI-in-a-tizzy-over-Paks-precision-in-faking-notes/articleshow/11595320.cms?intenttarget=no
