They aren't fake. They're "unreliable". Plenty of Chinese officials have said this themselves. "fake" implies that the Chinese government is the one faking the data. They say "unreliable" because the faking is being done at much lower levels. So the central government itself do not know what is the real number.

Presumably, this was declared to both Malaysian and Singapore customs. IINM, the limit is US$10k on the Malaysian side, and S$20k on the Singaporean side. There are fines and jail term for people trying to smuggle large amount of money across the border.

BTW: I am curious what was the amount saved (the difference between bank rate and money changer rate).

Let me help you. The largest note we have is RM100. A stack of 100 pieces of that would be RM10,000. It'll be about as thick as your finger, about 1cm.

Laid out on the table, you can stack 6 of them side-by-side in the area occupied about that of an A4 piece of paper.

A nice thick book, say a reference book or a dictionary, might be 4cm thick. 48 stacks of those RM100 bills will fit in the volume taken up by that single large book. Or two smaller books.

In otherwords, it can quite easily fit inside your laptop bag, and still leave space for the laptop inside.

Yes, can trust. They do not lie by telling you that it's going up when it's going down. What is happening is they only report when it's going up. When it's going down, they go find something else to write about. You've never noticed that?