Three years after it was withdrawn from circulation, the Rs 2,000 currency note is still in demand for a different reason—superstition. The Bengaluru city police on Tuesday announced the arrest of a 10-member gang that allegedly collected the notes from the public in the guise of performing a “money-multiplying pooja” and submitted them to the Reserve Bank of India.
Seemant Kumar Singh, Commissioner of Police, Bengaluru, said the accused—arrested from different parts of Bengaluru and Andhra Pradesh—were sent to judicial custody. They were identified as Mohan K, Shreenivasa Murthy, Raju, Basavaraj, Munishamappa, Mallikarjun, Ramakrishna, Pally Muralidhar, Ramachandra, and Mubarak.
An RBI official filed a complaint at the Halasuru Gate police on October 17 stating that Rs 2,000 notes whose serial numbers had been altered were submitted to the central bank. The police then identified a person who had deposited the notes at the RBI and arrested him at his home in Cubbonpet on October 24.
Upon interrogation, the man confessed to having deposited Rs 40,000 at the bank, stating that he had received the money from two acquaintances who had promised him a commission. These two people were arrested near Mysore Bank Circle on the same day, Singh said.
It was later found that the accused had received Rs 8 lakh in Rs 2,000 notes from three other people known to them for depositing the money at the RBI and transferring the equivalent amount to their accounts.
During interrogation, they confessed that they had cheated the public by falsely claiming that if they performed a special “pooja” using Rs 2,000 notes (except the “O”, “OO”, “OP”, and “OU” series printed in 2018 with consecutive serial numbers withdrawn from circulation), they would multiply the money a hundredfold and cause a “rain of money”, the police said.
Rs 18 lakh’s worth of Rs 2,000 notes seized
By convincing people of this fraudulent ritual, they collected the withdrawn Rs 2,000 notes from the public. The other arrests were made from Bengaluru and Andhra Pradesh later.
Singh said, “In total, Rs 18 lakh’s worth of Rs 2,000 notes were seized in this case. All the accused were handed over to judicial custody on Monday. One female accused is absconding, and efforts are underway to trace her.”
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A police officer said the network was divided into three parts. One person designed currency according to the demand (the demands like “0′ series), another performed the ritual, and a gang helped to exchange the currency from the RBI. The victims were told that they would get Rs 2 crore if they brought Rs 2,000 notes worth Rs 2 lakh and performed a pooja with them. In a lot of instances, these people escaped with the money in the guise of conducting a pooja.
“It doesn’t look like the gang had approached rich people. It approached only middle-class or poor people. The entire scam got exposed when a genuine currency note that a man had deposited was found to have a suspicious serial number,” the officer added.
The RBI withdrew the Rs 2,000 notes from circulation in October 2023, and the public was asked to exchange the currency from banks initially and later at RBI offices across the country by providing KYC details.