Pune, Feb 28 : Pimpri-Chinchwad Police have busted a racket which used to print fake Rs 500 Indian currency notes on Chinese paper ordered online and arrested six persons, including an engineer, officials said here on Wednesday.

A team led by Dehu Road Police Station's Senior Inspector of Police, Nitin Fatangare seized 440 counterfeit Rs 500 denomination notes, 4,700 partly-printed notes bills, 4,484 printed and ready-to-cut notes, 1,000 sheets of Chinese made currency paper, a printing machine sourced locally, laptops, paper-cutting machines and other articles from the accused.

The incident came to light after a tip-off that a young IT engineer, Hruthik Khadse, 22, had started a printing business with some of his friends.

They had bought a used printing machine from the Appa Balwant Chowk area and started their printing unit in Dighi, to publish pamphlets, handbills and other odd publicity materials.

However, the business went into losses as they failed to get sufficient orders, and then one of the prime accused, a driver named Suraj Yadav, 41, suggested the idea of printing fake Indian currency notes to make easy money.

Yadav claimed to know the art of designing the notes, the paper was ordered from a Chinese e-commerce portal and they printed 140 notes of Rs 500 denomination including the water-mark, thread and other security features, as a trial.

They secured a Rs 40,000 order to print 200 such fake notes with a face value of Rs 1,00,000, and Yadav was caught red-handed when he attempted to pass off 140 of the fraudulent notes to some customers in Mukai Chowk.

Others arrested for the fraud are Pranav Gavhane, 31, Akash Dhangekar, 22, Tejas Ballal, 19 and Suraj Salunkhe, 32, and all the six accused have been sent to police custody for a week, said the officials.

The police are probing how far the tentacles of the racket are spread, how the gang managed to design the near-authentic currency notes along with several of the security elements available on the genuine notes, and other unknown associates or customers of the accused.

/IANS