A video shared across social media showing thousands of US dollars in a garbage container had one Lebanese village in a tizzy over what had happened.
Instead of trash, cleaners in the village of Sin el Fil in Lebanon found heaps of what appeared to be American currency, sparking joy and confusion across social media.
Nabil Kahala, the mayor of Sin el Fil, broke the news.
‘What happened is true, but these are fake dollars,’ Kahala said. ‘Rather they are forged, and are plain papers on which a picture of the hundred-dollar banknote is printed, and have been reproduced thousands of times in the form of a photo strip.’
As the video was shared, locals began to question what had happened.
‘It was a strange morning,’ Kahala said. ‘I woke up to the phone ringing, and someone told me that Sin el Fil had been drowning in thousands of dollars.’
He explained that officials soon realized that the village sadly was not drowning in actual money.
‘However, we soon discovered that they were ordinary papers on which a picture of the $100 bill was printed, expecting that it would belong to one of the institutions concerned, for example, with filming a movie or something similar, according to the type of attached papers,’ he said.
The garbage bin the fake money was left in was in an area without surveillance cameras, the mayor told local media.
It was found in a non-residential area known as Dahr El-Gamal, which is parallel to the Beirut River.
‘We soon informed the Internal Security Forces, which in turn raised the matter to the Public Prosecution to follow up the investigation of the event that was buzzing with the media and social networking sites, and based on this matter, the security forces received the file and began their investigations to find out the source of these notes and how they reached the container,’ Kahala said.
Private waste companies work in Beirut to empty these containers, which are common in all regions. It’s reported that the workers who stumbled upon the false fortune were responsible for sharing the incident across social media, Gulf Today reported.
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