It was shocking when three students from Pune, India, unknowingly got caught in a smuggling case while going to Dubai to pursue their studies. Customs officials at Pune Airport found $400,000 concealed in their notebooks. The postgraduate students were totally unaware of the money. They had received their bags from Khushbu Agarwal, a travel agent in Pune, who told them the bags contained documents for Dubai. Nothing could have been more different; these “papers” contained a huge quantity of5 smuggled money.

The exposed plot was witnessed when Customs received a lead and raided some students’ bags suspected to contain high amounts of foreign currency before they fled to Dubai; an agency in New Delhi allowed their return to India to undergo the investigation. At the Pune airport, the customs officials discovered $400,100 in hundred-dollar bills concealed in the notebooks.

However, the students were just following what the travel agent instructed and they had intended only to chase education in Dubai. As the investigation unfolded, the police busted Khushbu Agarwal and her accomplice, who is suspected of having provided the money; his name is Mohd Aamir, a forex trader from Mumbai. By this time, search raids across the three cities; Pune, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad were wreaking great havoc, exposing a remorseless network. Agarwal and Aamir were placed in judicial custody at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune.

The investigation is at a very early stage and ongoing by customs authorities trying to figure out whether the students knew of what they were supposed to do or were merely innocent students who were not told the truth; there seem to be connections within this whole operation with hawala, a covert money transfer system made especially for moving large sums of money unwillingly through the normal monetary process.