Man arrested in fake currency case

The Avinashi police arrested a man on Saturday on charges of cheating ₹4 lakh from a woman using fake currency notes near Tiruppur.

Sureshkumar, 43, who was a resident of Maniyakarampalayam in Coimbatore, was accused of pretending to be a private money lender by the name of Acharya to a woman named Jenifer, 32 from Chennai, the police said. The woman contacted him seeking a loan of ₹1 crore based on newspaper advertisement.

The accused told her that the registration fees will be ₹4 lakh to sell her property. On August 26, they met at a restaurant in Avinashi where he accepted the fees from Ms. Jenifer and handed over a briefcase claiming that it contained the initial amount of ₹55 lakh. She later realised that the briefcase contained fake currency notes of face value of ₹2,000 and had the words ‘Children Bank of India’ printed on each note.

Based on her complaint, Avinashi police registered a case and traced the accused in three days. Preliminary investigations revealed that he had been involved earlier in cheating cases using similar modus operandi in Madurai district and Puliampatti in Erode district, the police said.

The accused was also found to be involved in the 2014 theft of red sanders weighing nine tonnes from the Inland Container Depot at Irugur in Coimbatore, the police said. Further investigations are on.

He was booked under sections 420 (Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and 489 B (Using as genuine, forged or counterfeit currency-notes or bank-notes) of the Indian Penal Code and was remanded in judicial custody.