3 men arrested in Bihar’s Buxar village for printing fake currency notes at home: Cop

Dharmendra Singh, the prime suspect, shut down his private security agency in Hyderabad and returned to his village in Bihar’s Buxar in August last year, police said.

PATNA: Three men have been arrested in a Bihar village on charges of printing counterfeit currency notes, police said on Thursday after recovering fake notes of the face value of ₹3.12 lakh from a house in Buxar district’s Manoharpur village.

Bihar’s Buxar police said Dharmendra Singh roped in his father and uncle in the fake currency enterprise that he set up. (REUTERS/File Photo)

Police said the prime accused, Dharmendra Singh, ran a private security agency in Hyderabad but returned to his village about 200 km from state capital Patna due to the Covid-19 lockdown in August last year. The other two accused are his father, Subhash Singh, and uncle, Ashok Singh.

But he had been planning to get into the fake currency notes enterprise for longer.

Buxar superintendent of police Neeraj Singh said Dharmendra told the police that he saw some YouTube videos and initially experimented with printing fake currency notes using a laptop and printer while he was still in Hyderabad. But he wasn’t satisfied with the notes that he printed.

Before returning home in August, he was able to get in touch with some people who taught him a few tricks over a three-month period including guiding him on the choice of paper to use, Neeraj Singh said.

Once back home, police said Dharmendra Singh appears to have started out by printing counterfeit notes of smaller denominations that he circulated without arousing suspicions of the villagers. Gradually, he gained the confidence to print notes with the face value of ₹200 and ₹500 as well.

One of the tricks that he had learnt was printing images that looked similar to the watermark of Mahatma Gandhi and the ₹500 in bold green on the notes.

Police said Dharmendra Singh has claimed in his initial interrogation that he started circulating the fake notes only a couple of months earlier. But the police aren’t so sure. The Buxar SP said this was an aspect, like many others, which the police still have to investigate in detail. Another aspect, he said, was the role played by the individuals in Hyderabad identified by Dharmendra Singh. A team would be sent to Hyderabad to gather further details, he said.