Vadodara Police Bust Fake Currency Racket Inspired by Viral Video

It was a cash deposit that should have gone unnoticed. On the morning of April 29, a man approached a cash deposit machine at an ATM kiosk on Waghodia Road in Vadodara and fed it 20 crisp notes of Rs. 500 into the slot. The account the sum was meant for is owned by one Sagar Ramesh Maru. But the machine turned out to be ‘smarter’. Within moments, it flagged every single note as ‘counterfeit’. The next day, a formal complaint was lodged at Vadodara’s Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) Police Station under BNS Sections 178, 179, and 180, which deal with offenses related to counterfeiting currency and stamps, and the case was handed to the Special Operations Group (SOG). SOG teams, led by police inspector BD Jitiya, traced Maru—an undergraduate student at a private university in Waghodia—and arrested him. A search of his home turned up Rs 2.18 lakh in cash, but all in genuine currency notes. During his questioning, Maru reportedly pointed to a friend, Nisarg Patel, as the source of the fake notes. Nisarg was picked up next. He was in possession of 35 more counterfeit Rs. 500 notes. He, then, named Dhanush Prakash Hallikeri, a hostel resident near the university on Waghodia Road. Dhanush was found with 50 fake notes — the largest individual haul from the Vadodara arrests. What followed was the unravelling of what investigators believed was an organised racket supplying fake currency brought from Rajasthan to Gujarat’s student population. But investigators soon discovered an even more telling fact: it was not just an opportunistic fraud. According to police findings, Hallikeri was inspired by recent viral reels showing the Ahmedabad DCB’s high-profile arrest of ‘Pradeep Guruji’ in a fake currency racket. The content, meant to showcase law enforcement success, allegedly inspired a “copycat crime”. SOG PI Jitiya said: “Dhanush saw an opportunity. He allegedly treated the footage of Ahmedabad DCB arresting Pradeep Guruji as a rough blueprint and studied how the racket had worked, identified where it had been exposed, and concluded he could do it more carefully… He began exploring ways to replicate a similar racket, but on a smaller, low-risk scale. For that, he needed people. Mostly, young and discreet students, who could be motivated by the lure of quick money…” Jitiya said Dhanush knew one Manohar alias Munna Mangilal Gujjar, who is believed to be a key supplier of counterfeit currency from Rajasthan, as Gujjar’s relatives were Dhanush’s neighbours in Morbi. Dhanush then turned to Tirth Likhiya, also a native of Morbi with access to student circles around Vadodara. Tirth contacted Bhavesh Sharma, who allegedly accompanied Maru to Rajasthan from where the duo returned with counterfeit notes worth Rs 1 lakh, in exchange of a fee of Rs 50,000 of real Indian currency. Till this report was filed, the police had recovered counterfeit notes worth Rs 90,000. All five were produced before the court within hours, where the SOG was granted five days of custody of the accused to trace the supply chain to its source. In custody, the five accused named two Rajasthan-based men—Akshay Sanwarlal Goyal and Munna. “An SOG team was dispatched to Rajashtan and on May 4 Goyal was arrested from Kekdi village of Byavar in Rajasthan. An SUV bearing a Gujarat registration was also seized in connection with the case…” said Jitiya, adding that Goyal had accepted the payment of Rs 50,000 on “Google Pay”, while handing over the counterfeit currency to Maru. Jitiya added that in the remand application, the police urged the court to grant custody in order to establish the connection between the students and Munna as well as probe the “intention” of the accused in circulating the fake currency. “We need to track Munna Gujjar, who remains at large, as he will be able to throw light at the modus operandi and also to crack into the network of counterfeit currency,” Jitiya said. Police said that the investigation would also focus on the counterfeit currency allegedly used by the accused as the police have been able to recover only Rs 90,000 of counterfeit notes instead of the Rs 1 lakh that the students claim to have brought from Rajasthan.