Iraq's new banknotes have taken over as the top item for confiscation by customs at Egyptian airports, taking over from Viagra pills, mobile phones and computers.
Cairo newspapers said the fever for the "Bremer dinar," named after the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, spread from Nile Delta villages, north of Cairo, that provided a wealth of expatriate workers in Saddam's Iraq.
The speculation causing many to stash the dinar is fuelled by the belief its value will rise as the economy of war-devastated Iraq recovers with foreign aid, its oil exports increase and its huge debt is rescheduled or erased.
The fever rose in the weeks before Thursday's expiry of the deadline to exchange the old dinars, bearing the face of former president Saddam Hussein, with the banknotes put in circulation three months ago by the US-led coalition.
According to rates quoted in newspapers, the dinar peaked on the black market at 55 for one Egyptian pound, but then fell to 133 to the pound.
The dinar is still doing far better in the Egyptian black market than it was in Baghdad, where it reached a post-war high of 1,000 to the dollar.
The dollar buys around 6.15 Egyptian pounds in banks and reportedly seven pounds on the black market. Egyptian experts said if trading in the Iraqi currency was to be allowed, the local pound would fetch 232 dinars.
According to local press reports, of all the passengers inspected last week as they arrived from Iraq's neighbours Syria and Jordan and from Gulf states, one in 10 was found to be carrying Iraqi dinars.
The sums seized varied between five million and 200 million dinars, between 5,000 and 200,000 dollars at the market exchange rate in Baghdad.
Egypt's central bank has ordered banks and foreign exchange bureaus not to deal with the Iraqi currency, and security services have been given instructions to crack down on the black market, said the press.
The only bank to have dealt in the past few weeks with the new currency was the Egyptian American Bank, but it removed it from the pricing board on Wednesday, newspapers said.
On Thursday, the official MENA news agency said a total of 50 million dinars, worth 50,000 dollars, were confiscated at the airport of the northern city of Alexandria, carried by four Egyptians and one Kuwaiti traveller.
MENA on Wednesday reported that customs officials at the airport in the southern city of Luxor arrested an Egyptian returning from Kuwait carrying 38 million dinars, or 38,000 dollars.
Egyptian law does not ban the possession of foreign currencies, but it specifies they should be declared to customs upon entry. And it also bans currency speculation.
Egyptian experts, through the media, have cautioned the population that they should not expect a quick recovery of the Iraqi economy, and that betting on the Bremer dinar could prove an illusion.