Moscow’s mighty 10-lane Ring Road is famous for rather large volumes of traffic, and this morning was no different, except that this morning, fake money was responsible for the chaos. Russian radio station Echo Moskvy reported that scores of drivers hurriedly left their vehicles during peak hour traffic to gather what looked like 1000-ruble notes.

It’s not surprising that drivers got excited because that’s the equivalent of a R250 note, and I think most of us would do the same, given the opportunity.

Alas, it was all in vain, as the notes turned out to be replicas that were actually just bookmarks.

Police spokesman Arkady Bashirov explained that it was merely a case of “somebody [making] a stupid joke,” by throwing the wads of bookmarks along a stretch of the road that circles the Russian capital.

He continued that sprinkler trunks had to be called in to wash away the fakes.

A similar bottleneck had happened in July last year – but with real money – where two Moscow officials were detained after spilling 10 million rubles, about R2.5 million, in alleged bribe money.

The fishery officials had thrown the cash on the road and, as you can imagine, folks were all over it. Regrettably, citizens only managed to acquire about R250 000 of it.

[Source: Yahoo]