But the Wednesday morning chaos on the Moscow Ring Road was all in vain.

Police spokesman Arkady Bashirov says “somebody made a stupid joke” by throwing wads of bookmarks resembling thousand-ruble ($35) notes along a stretch of the road circling Moscow. He says sprinkler trunks were called in to wash away the fakes.

A similar traffic jam happened last July — but with real money _when two Moscow officials detained with 10 million rubles ($350,000) in alleged bribe money threw the cash on the road.