A minor boy was arrested with fake currency notes worth Rs.1.06 lakh in Bihar's East Champaran district. It is for the first time that a child has been caught with fake notes, officials said Friday.
The 14-year-old boy was arrested late Thursday by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) on a specific tip-off that the people involved in the Fake Indian Currency Note (FICN) trade were using children as carriers.
"It shocked us when we arrested the boy with a small consignment of fake notes. Never before have we arrested a minor with fake notes," a DRI official said.
Another DRI official told IANS here on condition of anonymity that the teenager during interrogation confessed that he successfully carried consignments of fake notes a couple of times in the past few months.
"He also told us that gangs involved in FICN trade have been using children to escape tight security and minimize risk of suspicion," the official said.
According to officials, the boy was held when he was travelling on a bus from Siliguri to Motihari, the district headquarters of East Champaran.
About 90 fake notes of Rs.1,000 denomination and 33 notes of Rs.500 were recovered from him. The notes were wrapped in a sheet of a Kolkata daily.
The minor also revealed that someone called 'Dada' handed over the fake notes bundle to him to be carried to Motihari, from where another man would have collected it.
A day after the boy was arrested, the DRI alerted its officials and other security agencies to be watchful of minor children being used as carriers.
Officials admitted that Bihar was emerging as a hub of distribution of fake Indian currency notes.
Till a few years ago, counterfeit notes were brought from Bangladesh and smuggled to Nepal via West Bengal and Bihar before being pumped into the country again. But now, notes are not sent to Nepal, and instead are distributed from the border areas of the state itself, officials said.
The DRI has arrested nine people in Bihar for carrying fake notes worth Rs.18 lakh from January to November 2013.
Other security agencies like Bihar Police, Sashastra Seema Bal and the Narcotics Control Bureau have also seized fake notes worth over Rs.20 lakh this year and made half a dozen arrests.
