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.…