Head of Central Bank of Iran’s Money Printing Department says no counterfeit paper money has been detected so far.
“The CBI has incorporated countermeasures to detect fake money and the security features help the people to identify genuine banknotes.” IRNA quoted Amir Shokri as saying on Monday.
“A banknote is legally considered counterfeit only if it mimics security features, so photocopied notes do not pose a security threat,” he said but warned that the number of fake banknotes had increased due to an abundance of color photocopiers in the country.
Shokri added that the CBI would issue 800 million banknotes by the end of the calendar year (March 2016).
“The printing department has produced new 500,000-rials Iran Check and has already distributed some of it,” he said.
The average cost of reprinting one banknote is 1,200 rials ($0.04) which amounts to an annual one trillion rials ($33 million). “An estimated 700 million old and worn-out bank notes were removed from circulation last year while there was a record withdrawal of 1.2 billion mutilated banknotes earlier,” he said.
The CBI’s printing department is responsible for printing and production of security papers and banknotes while the money issuance office distributes the banknotes.
Recent CBI data show a 816,000 billion rials ($272 billion) increase in the money supply by the end of the first quarter of the Iranian fiscal year (started March 21) marking a 22.7% year-on-year increase.
The Central Bank released the latest batch of the new version of 500,000-rial Iran Checks on August 26 coinciding with the birth anniversary of Imam Reza, the Eighth Shiite Imam. Such checks were originally issued by the CBI in August 2008 as legal tender.
CBI also offers a list of ‘banknote security features’ on its website asking citizens to fully inspect their notes. Linear design of the notes, security serial numbers, machine readable serial number, thermo ink and color change are prime examples of the features to help differentiate from fakes.
The CBI unveiled a new 50,000 rial bank note on March 2, in what has been deemed as a rather “unexpected move” by some political observers. The new note, which was unveiled with members of the University of Tehran’s faculty on March 4, 2015, replaced the nuclear symbols that covered a map of Iran with the gates of the University of Tehran.
