Ernesto Benavides / AFP - Getty Images

Sheets of counterfeit $50 bills seized by Peru's Department of Criminology are presented to the press in Lima on Wednesday.

Peruvian police have seized $2.3 million in counterfeit dollars, which a family clan planned to smuggle into the United States hidden inside souvenirs from the Andean country, reports said.

According to the British Broadcasting Corp., which cited Peruvian police chief Raul Salazar, the Quispe Rodriguez family clan was responsible for the production of the fake $50 bills.

U.S. officials have said that Peru is the largest foreign producer of counterfeit American money.

Authorities in Peru have seized $17 million in fake currency in 2012 alone, according to the BBC.

Salazar said Luis Alfredo Obando, a man allegedly belonging to the Quispe Rodriguez family clan, was arrested, the BBC said.

US: Peru overtakes Colombia as top cocaine producer

The money and materials for the production of the fake money were seized in the Peruvian capital, Lima, the BBC reported.

Other members of the Quispe Rodriguez clan were arrested in mid-July with $2 million in fake U.S. dollars and 1.5 million counterfeit euros, the Peruvian Times reported.

Among the members of the family allegedly used in the smuggling operation was a 13-year-old boy, the newspaper said.

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According to a 2009 report in the Los Angeles Times, many counterfeit currency smugglers use techniques also employed by drug gangs, such as hiding the fake money on human "mules" to get the fake paper inside the country.

Complete international coverage on NBCNews.com

"It's a form of economic terrorism," the Los Angeles Times quoted John Large, the assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service's criminal division, as saying at the time.

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James Morgan / WWF-Canon via AP

Seized elephant tusks and ivory ornaments go up in smoke Wednesday in Libreville, Gabon.

The Central African nation of Gabon on Wednesday burned all the elephant tusks and ivory ornaments it had in its stockpile -- an amount equivalent to 850 elephants -- so that smugglers, via corrupt government officials, won't get their hands on the black market commodities treasured in China and other parts of Asia.

"Gabon’s elephants are under siege because of an illegal international market," President Ali Bongo said. "I call on the international community to join us in this fight" by cracking down on smugglers and buyers. "If we do not reverse the tide, the African elephant is in serious trouble."

The international wildlife monitoring agency TRAFFIC is among those that fear skyrocketing prices for ivory will tempt more government officials across Africa to join the illegal trade.

"If not managed properly, ivory stockpiles in the hands of government suddenly 'get legs'," Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC's ivory trade expert, said in announcing the burn. "Zambia lost 3 tons of ivory from the government’s strong room just last week and Mozambique lost 1.1 tons in February."

"Gabon’s actions effectively keep the ivory out of the way of temptation," he said.

Kenya last year burned several tons of seized tusks and ivory as well, though that was not so much to deter temptation as it was to send a signal about the rampant illegal trade, where  tusks can sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. 

TRAFFIC's data showed record levels of tusk and ivory seizures last year.

Even before the spike in recent years, Africa's elephant population is estimated to have shrunk from 1.3 million in 1979 to 450,000 in 2007.

Worth some $10 million on the black market, nearly 11,000 pounds of ivory was burned on Wednesday -- including almost 1,300 pieces of rough ivory made from tusks and almost 18,000 pieces of worked ivory.

The international community in 2008 did try to ease the demand -- and the high prices that lure poachers -- by allowing Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe to sell their stockpiles, but prices continued upward.

The same strategy by Gabon would also fail, the conservation group WWF told msnbc.com.

"Commercialization would encourage additional elephant poaching," said Lee Poston, a spokesman for the WWF's U.S. office. "Like illegal drugs, seized ivory has no legitimate monetary value."

Gabon is home to more than half of Africa's remaining forest elephants.

Lee White, head of Gabon's National Parks Agency, said Africa had lost nearly 80 percent of its forest elephant population in the last 20 years. 

"Gabon is the last sanctuary," he said at Wednesday's ceremony, Reuters reported. "For example, there are now 20 times more elephants in Gabon than in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even if that country is 10 times larger than Gabon."

But even Gabon is threatened. Two elephant massacres were reported in the last year and Gabon has had to create an elite military unit to protect its wildlife.

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In neighboring Cameroon, several hundred elephants were killed earlier this year for their ivory -- inside a national park.

China was allowed to purchase tusks and ivory from the authorized sale in 2008, but conservationists say buyers there have abused the system by forging documents.

"It's essential that, given China's insatiable appetite for ivory, its 'ivory trading nation' status be revoked," Will Travers, head of the Born Free Foundation, said in a statement. 

The issue is expected to come up at a meeting next month among nations that are party to a treaty on the trade in wildlife.

The head of the treaty committee testified before a U.S. Senate committee last month, urging the U.S. and other nations to crack down.

A report coming out shortly will reveal that "the levels of illegal killing exceed what can be sustained in all four African sub-regions in 2011, with elephant populations now in net decline," John Scanlon, secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, told the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

Rhinos have also been slaughtered by smugglers after their horns, which are ground up to be used as a purported medicinal powder. The price for rhino horn has made it more valuable than gold.

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Interpol

Ivory ornaments and animal skins are displayed as part of INTERPOL's crackdown on illegal wildlife trafficking.

More than 200 people were arrested and two tons of ivory seized — along with guns, lion pelts, rhino horns and live birds — in the largest operation against wildlife smugglers to date, Interpol announced Tuesday. As sizable as the numbers are, though, the real test will be whether Africa finally sees a drop in the record slaughter of elephants and rhinos.

The three-month operation ranged across 17 African countries as well as China, where officials cracked down on websites and stores selling ornaments made from ivory, the trade for which is banned globally.

"The intelligence gathered during Operation Worthy will enable us to identify the links between the poachers and the global networks driving and facilitating the crime," David Higgins, head of Interpol's environmental crime program, said in a statement.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare helped Interpol by training officers in African countries, and said it also provided leads that allowed China to uncover 700 cases of illegal wildlife trade. 

China "busted 13 gangs, punished 1,031 illegal traders, seized over 130,000 wild animals and their animal products," IFAW said in a statement, adding that 7,155 shops and 628 websites selling banned animals were shut down.

Still, the two tons of ivory seized is just a fraction of what's smuggled each year.

Last year, a record 23 tons of ivory were confiscated -- which means many more got smuggled out of Africa. Those 23 tons probably represent some 2,500 elephants, the international monitoring group TRAFFIC said in a statement.

Report: Tens of thousands of elephants likely killed last year

And this year seizures include 359 tusks, weighing 1.6 tons, found in containers shipped out of Kenya.

In Cameroon, several hundred elephants were slaughtered last January -- inside a national park.

Africa's elephant population is estimated around 450,000 -- compared to between 5 million and 10 million in the 1930s.

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MALIBU, CALIF. -- On a starry night in the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean north of Los Angeles, a two-man California National Guard special forces surveillance team sets up a sophisticated night scope. Their mission is to search the horizon and the waters below for an increasing number of Mexican drug traffickers offloading multi-ton loads of marijuana--and sometimes illegal immigrants--on remote U.S. beaches.

"These service members are the eyes and ears of federal law enforcement here," said Lt. Kara Siepmann, of the Guard's National Drug program. When asked about what specifically they are looking for, one of the surveillance team members said, "We're looking for blacked out vessels and any suspicious activity we can find, any unusual boats coming through the area." 

Used to smuggle drugs from Mexico, this panga boat was captured near Huntington Beach, Calif., in August 2011. The faces of the three men being arrested have been obscured at the request of the HSI.

The soldiers work quietly and in the dark, aware that the Mexican traffickers have their own spotters here watching out for U.S. law enforcement personnel. "They don't want to land where the National Guard or the Border Patrol are looking for them," said Siepmann.

Turning fishing boats into drug boats
In the last few years, law enforcement officials said they have seen a considerable spike in smugglers loading drugs or immigrants onto boats in Mexico's northern Baja Peninsula, then motoring north to offload their illegal cargo along a 300-mile-long stretch of California beaches, sometimes within sight of the many luxury homes on the coastline. 

Courtesy of HSI/ICE

Used to smuggle drugs from Mexico, this panga boat was found in California's Ventura County in January 2012.

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Federal agents said this is the latest smuggling technique employed by Mexico's notorious Sinaloa drug cartel, headed by that country's most-wanted criminal, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. The boats are small, open-hulled commercial fishing boats called pangas, which are commonly found in the inshore waters of Mexico and Central America. 

With their low profiles, the pangas are hard to spot in open water, but they can carry a large payload. Sometimes these 30- to 40-foot boats will have as many as four outboard engines, allowing them to outrun most vessels used by the authorities.

"The trend is pretty much going straight up," said Lt. Stewart Sibert, the captain of the US Coast Guard Cutter Halibut, which patrols in search of Mexican smugglers near the California coast. 

"The past few months have been very busy for us," he said. "We caught more drugs in these past two months than in the past two years."

According to arrest statistics reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, there were 183 known "events" in fiscal year 2011 along the California coast involving the maritime smuggling of drugs or immigrants, up considerably from the previous three years. During the first seven months of this fiscal year, there have already been 113 such events as the numbers climb even faster than last year.

"We're seeing four and five tons of drugs come in per run and we're seeing dozens of runs. It's almost one or two per week at this point," said Sibert.

A dangerous trade heading north
Law enforcement officials have argued the rise in maritime smuggling is a direct result of their crackdown on smuggling operations along the U.S. land border with Mexico. As they first interdicted smuggling boats headed for beaches in southernmost California, near San Diego, they began to see the traffickers moving farther north to drop off their loads, which are then distributed across the country.

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"As we stop them in one area, they’re trying to go around us. We're sort of leapfrogging up the coastline," said Sibert. Recently, an abandoned panga and a hidden marijuana stash were found near San Simeon, Calif., more than 300 miles from the Mexican border.

"They go far out to sea to try to evade interdiction efforts along the border," said Claude Arnold, the special agent in charge for ICE Homeland Security Investigations. "They typically go 100 miles out or farther due west, and then they come north," to reach the U.S. coastline.

While the panga boats are considered relatively stable when used for fishing in calm inshore waters, officials said, they can be quite dangerous in rougher waters offshore, especially if they are overloaded with drugs or illegal immigrants. The boats rarely have adequate safety equipment and authorities speculate that many may have been lost at sea, along with their passengers.

Courtesy of HSI/ICE

Used to smuggle drugs from Mexico, this panga boat was found on California's Leo Carrillo Beach in August 2011.

"It's a direct indication of these criminal smuggling organizations' complete disregard for human life. They are driven by profit and nothing else," said Troy Matthews, of the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego. "You'll have somebody driving the ship who is not necessarily highly-trained. You'll have poorly maintained vehicles that will break down and subsequently they are loitering out at sea for days."

A border security threat
As they find more boats on the beaches and make more arrests, U.S. authorities are learning more about how the smuggling operation work, and the degree to which they are coordinated with land-based trafficking operations.

"We've seen some pangas that run directly up onto the beach and upload their cargo," said Sibert. "And then we've seen some that will come in and transfer their load to recreational boats that look less suspicious and try to run them directly into the marinas and yacht clubs."

Many times the panga boat operators will land at night on remote beaches near roads or a highway where they met by other members of the smuggling group. "There's usually an offloading team that will have a rental boxcar, U-Haul, or something of that nature to take the payload and transport it to a stash house where an organization begins the distribution process," said Arnold. 

A particular concern voiced by many U.S. authorities is the potential national security threat these boats and smugglers represent.  "They're just as willing to smuggle perhaps a weapon of mass destruction as they are a load of narcotics," warned Arnold.  "And they're just as willing to smuggle a terrorist as people coming here to work."  

To coordinate their interdiction efforts, federal, state and local law enforcement officials have formed a coastal-area task force. "As they adapt, we will adapt, and they'll continually try to find new ways to get contraband and people into the country, and we're going to be right there nipping at their heels," said Arnold.

Authorities conceded, however, that so far they are seeing no let-up in the Mexican maritime smuggling trade, and, in fact, are actually seeing bigger drug loads on boats now than in recent years.

"It's a huge challenge," said Matthews, from the U.S. Border Patrol. "It's an immense geographical area that we have to cover. There is not only single agency that can cover it by itself."

AP, file

More than 242 pounds of marijuana seized from a vehicle that tried to enter the U.S. near San Diego in 2010. The driver said he had responded to a newspaper ad allegedly placed by drug smugglers to recruit drivers to unwittingly take drugs across the border.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- The war on drugs is going to the classified sections of Mexican newspapers.

Smugglers have long advertised work as security guards, housecleaners and cashiers, telling applicants they must drive company cars to the United States. They aren't told the cars are loaded with drugs.

Starting this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement began buying ad space in Tijuana newspapers to warn jobseekers they might be unwitting pawns.

"Why don't we do the same thing that (cartels are) doing? It's successful for them. Why wouldn't it be successful for us?" Lester Hayes, a group supervisor for ICE in San Diego, recalls his agents telling him.

There have been 39 arrests since February 2011 at San Diego's two border crossings tied to the ads for seemingly legitimate jobs, according to ICE, which hadn't seen such significant numbers before.

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Those arrests have yielded 3,400 pounds of marijuana, 75 pounds of cocaine and 100 pounds of methamphetamine — a tiny fraction of total seizures but enough to convince U.S. authorities that smugglers are increasingly turning to the recruitment technique.

Drug smugglers always look to exploit weak links along the 1,954-mile border, even if the window of opportunity is brief. In the past several years, they have turned to makeshift boats on the Pacific Ocean and ultralight aircraft in the deserts of California and Arizona. In the San Diego area, there has been a spike in teenagers strapping drugs to their bodies to walk across the border from Tijuana.

Some suddenly popular techniques are limited to particular pockets of the border. ICE has not spotted significant spikes in newspaper ads outside of San Diego.

Guillermo Arias / AP, file

Motorists line up to cross the border into the U.S. from Tijuana at the U.S. Customs and Border protection port of entry in San Ysidro, on July 17, 2008.

Lower expenses for traffickers
Ads that authorities connect to drug smugglers appear innocuous. They offer work in the United States — an invitation that only people who can cross the border legally need apply — with a phone number and sometimes a location to apply in person.

New hires are told to drive company cars across the border, typically to a fast-food restaurant or shopping center in San Diego, according to ICE. When they arrive, they are often told there will be no work after all that day and must leave the car and walk back to Mexico after being paid a small amount.

The drivers are typically paid $50 to $200 a trip — much less than the $1,500 to $5,000 that seasoned smugglers are typically paid for such trips, Hayes said.

For drug traffickers, the tactic lowers expenses and, they hope, makes drivers appear less nervous when questioned by border inspectors, said Millie Jones, an assistant special agent in charge of investigations for ICE in San Diego.

Cross-border methamphetamine trade booms amid Mexico's 'war on drugs'

The drugs are stashed in the usual ways. Fifteen pounds of methamphetamine were found in a pickup truck's phony exhaust pipe in November. More than 250 pounds of marijuana were discovered in a van's overhead compartment last April.

More than 200 pounds of marijuana were found in vacuum-sealed plastic bags smothered in grease. Drugs are typically mixed with mustard, ketchup and fabric fresheners to defuse odors and ward off dogs used by authorities.

For years, U.S. authorities have bought newspaper space and broadcast airtime south of the border to deter illegal border crossings. The Border Patrol has a long-running media campaign in Mexico and Central America that includes musical "corridos," short documentaries and public service announcements.

The ICE ads that began appearing Sunday in classified sections of Tijuana's Frontera and El Mexicano are nothing fancy. Bold black letters say, "Warning! Drug traffickers are announcing jobs for drivers to go to the United States. Don't fall victim to this trap."

Mexican newspapers have faced online competitors but the papers' classified sections are relatively robust compared to U.S. publications.

Desperate for work, people often tricked
Victor Clark, director of Tijuana's Binational Center for Human Rights, doubts the ads will work without specific instructions on how to confirm whether a company is legitimate, such as calling an ICE telephone number.

"It's very difficult for someone who is unemployed to know whether it's a trap," Clark said. "I don't think many people are inclined to investigate if they are desperate for work."

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The cases can be challenging for prosecutors because drivers may not know they are smuggling drugs.

Debra Hartman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego, declined to say how many cases have been prosecuted or cite any examples. Rachel Cano, assistant chief of the San Diego County district attorney's southern branch, said each case is different.

"Just like any other case, a theft case, we look at all of the facts and if there are sufficient facts that meet the elements of a crime and we can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, then we file charges," Cano said.

Guadalupe Valencia, a San Diego defense attorney, said the ads by U.S. authorities might inadvertently help defendants. Attorneys will argue it is an acknowledgement that people are often tricked.

"It has always been my opinion that there are many unknowing couriers," he said. "The challenge for the prosecution is you always have to prove knowledge."

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traffic.org

A pig-nosed turtle.

Arrests of would-be smugglers packing suitcases with wildlife are hardly uncommon, but what happened Wednesday in Indonesia set a new bar: 1,495 live pig-nosed turtles were seized at an airport - crammed into two suitcases.

"The authorities involved in intercepting this shipment are to be congratulated,” Chris Shepherd, who works for the wildlife monitoring agency TRAFFIC, said in a statement. "However, the fact that dealers continue to smuggle shipments of this size indicates a serious problem in Indonesia, where illegal reptile trade is rife."

TRAFFIC estimates that thousands of pig-nosed turtles, "valued as pets, and possibly consumed as meat in some countries," are smuggled out of Indonesia each year.

The species , threatened by smugglers and loss of habitat, is native to Indonesia's Papua region and is protected under Indonesian law.

"Many are destined for the pet markets of East Asia, to places such as Hong Kong, where demand for this species is rising," TRAFFIC added. "The turtles are often concealed in shipments of tropical aquarium fish."

In 2010, Indonesian officials found nearly 3,500 pig-nosed turtles in six containers bound for Hong Kong.

It's not just pig-nosed turtles, either, that are sought by smugglers feeding a demand for exotic pets or food. TRAFFIC regularly reports seizures of wildlife in Indonesia and other parts of Asia as well as Africa, where elephant tusks and rhino horns are valuable commodities.

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KATMANDU, Nepal -- Police in Nepal have arrested a U.S. man who was allegedly a member of a smuggling ring that sent illegal drugs into the United States by concealing them in Buddhist prayer wheels.

The drugs, which were also put into metal bowls, were sent via Federal Express, authorities said.

Police official Navraj Silwal said Kristian Peter Stiegler, 45, was detained while trying to send 2.5 pounds of hashish, a form of cannabis, and 2 pounds of suspected opium.

If tests confirm the substance is opium, Stiegler could face up to 20 years in prison.

However, Silwal said Stiegler would likely get a lighter sentence because he was cooperating in the investigation into the alleged drug ring.

'Hefty sum'
Silwal said Stiegler has lived in Nepal and India for three years and was suspected of sending several drug shipments.

The Himalayan News Service said hashish was allegedly sent to Europe, as well as to the United States.

It reported the smuggling ring was discovered when police in Dubai intercepted two parcels of hashish that Steigler had allegedly sent to a New Orleans woman.

"Stiegler used to send hashish to the woman via airmail in the form of parcels and the woman used to distribute the drug in black market for a hefty sum," Yadav Raj Adhikari, chief of the Narcotic Drug Control Law Enforcement Unit, told the Himalayan News Service.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.