On September 3, the Customs and Excise Department of the Ministry of Finance unveiled a demonstration in the Ministry by a currency detection dog that prevents unauthorized bank notes being taken abroad by sniffing them out.
Banknote-sniffing dogs have been deployed at Narita Airport for the first time in Japan since August, and are expected to be introduced more widely, in order to prevent taking out cash swindled by frauds. Lilax, a six-year-old Labrador retriever, was accompanied by a custom officer. Five staff members acting as travelers lined up in a row with their baggage, and Lilax sniffing the bags in turn. He didn’t react to bags that didn’t contain banknotes, but responded to a bag with hidden training materials that imitated large amount of banknotes. He sat down on the spot and informed the officer.
Currency detection dogs have already been introduced in the US, Canada and Australia. There have been calls for introducing it in Japan, where traffic to and from overseas is expanding rapidly, and drug detection dogs have been retrained for about a month. The dogs are trained to remember that if they sit down where they smell banknotes, the officers will play with them.
The Customs Act requires customs declarations to be made when cash and other items exceeding 1 million yen are taken out of the country. According to Customs, in recent years there has been a spate of cases of fraud groups leaving the country with large amounts of cash hidden in their baggage for money laundering, making border control measures an issue.
Currency detection dogs will be deployed progressively at international airports.
Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki, who observed the demonstration, said ‘I think the role of the dogs will grow in the future. I wish them all the best.’
