To spot fake, look for 'crying Gandhi'

To spot fake, look for 'crying Gandhi'
Nikhil Chinapa / DNA
Monday, October 5, 2009 2:27 IST

Mumbai: Each time a shopkeeper or a bank cashier scrutinises the Rs500 or Rs1,000 note you hand over, you wonder "what if the note turns out to be a fake?" Well, there is an easy way you can check the note yourself, a method the Mumbai police tripped upon recently while carrying out an operation against drug dealers.
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"Hold the note against light with the image of Mahatma Gandhi facing you. If you observe carefully, on the left side of the note, an outline of his image will appear. This is the watermark and it should be a mirror image of the portrait on the right. If the watermark appears distorted, the note is a fake," said a senior police officer. "Such notes are called 'crying Gandhi' by fake currency smugglers."

He said if a fake note is soaked in water, the watermark disappears.

The police stumbled upon the 'crying Gandhi' code name recently when its anti-narcotics cell was acting on a tip-off against heroine smugglers. "After we busted a peddler, he informed us that he also had a packet of 'crying Gandhi' with him," the officer said, adding that the police did not understand what he meant by the term until he blurted out that it referred to fake currency. "He told us that all the notes were in Rs500 and Rs1,000 denominations and are normally mixed with real notes to avoid detection."

Fake currency smuggling is very lucrative, the officer said. While a smuggler gets Rs40,000 for a fake note consignment of Rs1 lakh, a carrier, who distributes the notes inside the country, gets Rs5,000. Counterfeit currency is smuggled into the country mainly through the porous Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangla borders.

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