Key findings of the investigation
- Hawala is a centuries-old system often used for remittances but increasingly employed by criminals to move and launder money from drug and human trafficking, terror financing and tax fraud.
- Highly organized secret hawala networks in cities all over Europe act as underground banks, laundering billions of euros of illicit origin every year. Authorities point at hubs in areas like UAE, Turkey and Southeast Asia.
- One WhatsApp group called “The traders of greater Europe”, had 532 hawala brokers. Over nine months they exchanged over 82,000 messages detailing transactions worth hundreds of millions of euros all over the world.
- Hawala plays a key role in human trafficking, facilitating the movement of funds and providing an “escrow” service as insurance for the migrants.
- An analysis of over 23,000 financial transactions showed thousands of payments to European businesses from Danish shell companies which cooperate with hawala rings. Many transactions were third-party payments for countries under economic sanctions.
- Obstacles in international law enforcement cooperation hamper coordinated action despite authorities calling underground banking "the Achilles heel of organized crime".
The couriers kept arriving, each carrying a bag of cash into a nondescript office on the industrial edge of the Dutch city of Leiden. After stating the origin of each package, they handed it to a Turkish man sitting beneath framed pictures of waterfalls. Nearby, another man handled the money-counting machine, its whirring sound filling the room. “It really was a bit like being in a movie”, said Frank (not his real name), a Danish former money-launderer, as he described his first encounter with the hawala networks. In the 90 minutes that he spent there, Frank saw at least five or six messengers, bringing in a total of “no less than a million euros”, to be stored in cupboards and drawers with other wads of notes, neatly organized by color.
Frank was introduced by a common friend to the Turkish man, whom he describes as “the then-vice president of the hawala bank in Europe.” Trust is the “alpha and omega”, he said, of these networks of brokers, known as hawaladars. Once Frank became an insider, he was entrusted with taking away the cash and introducing it into the formal economy, laundering dozens of millions of euros from hawaladars over the years. “What I found out later is that it’s not just about money,” said Frank, “it’s about terror financing; it’s about drug trafficking. It’s about prostitution and all sorts of other crap, to put it nicely. And you can look back and say that it may not be the proudest thing I’ve supported, but that’s how it is.”
Authorities say that in recent years hawala has become the underground bank of choice for criminals looking to finance their operations and launder billions of euros from their activities. “They operate this parallel financial system,” said Lucy Myles, Head of the Financial Team at Europol, “and they really are providing what is the lifeblood of organized crime. It works as a trust-based system, on networks that are operating right around the globe.”
Reporting across several European and Middle Eastern countries, under the umbrella of the EBU Investigative Journalism Network, journalists from public service media DR in Denmark, VRT and RTBF in Belgium, RTVE in Spain and ORF in Austria, have exposed the inner workings of this global underground banking system, which uses hawala to offer crucial services to criminals. For the past two years they investigated these networks, speaking to hawaladars and their clients, national and international law enforcement, money launderers and financial experts, and gaining exclusive access to thousands of court and financial records.
"Frank" (not his real name) is a former money launderer highly connected with hawala brokers in Europe. Photo by DR
Hawala, an Arabic word meaning “transfer” and similar informal money-transfer systems like Feiqian in China or Hundi in India, have been around for centuries. Considered the predecessors of modern banking, transactions in these age-old systems are made by rearranging debt rather than by transferring physical money. Hawala’s origin is linked to merchants looking to avoid carrying their profits along the bandit-ridden routes of the Silk Road; nowadays it is used daily by scores of people worldwide to send remittances in a cheaper, more accessible way than official international transfer systems. It is regulated in some countries and tolerated in others, but in most of Europe it is not technically legal, since brokers don’t have the licenses that the EU and countries’ national laws require for all commercial financial activities.
- To transfer money via hawala, the payer hands cash to a hawaladar, often at a shop or other business that also runs a legitimate front activity. In exchange, the sender receives a “token” as proof of the transaction. It can be a code, a photo, or even their ID picture.
- The payer transmits this "token" to the beneficiary, together with the location of the pickup point. In Europe, this system is widely used by migrants looking to send remittances, usually to countries in Africa or the Middle East with limited or no access to international banking systems.
- The beneficiary of the transaction visits their local hawaladar. In exchange for the "token" they receive the cash in local currency, minus the commissions taken by both hawaladars. These are usually between one and seven percent, although they can vary greatly according to the risk, the destination or the amounts involved.
- The physical money never traveled, but there’s now an outstanding debt between the hawaladars. This balance will be offset with future transactions or through the wider network of hawala transfers, which also includes cryptocurrency exchanges. There is usually no paper trail or record of this international transaction. Hawala is based on an almost-sacred bond of trust between hawaladars.
To find out just how easy it would be to transfer money across the world bypassing any registered financial company, journalists from VRT searched for local hawaladars in Belgium, where according to national law only legal entities registered with the Financial Services and Markets Authority can perform commercial money transfers.
A man contacted through Facebook met a journalist from VRT in the street to receive 250 euros in cash for transfer to Gaza. Photo by VRT
The money was available immediately in Gaza, where another journalist working for VRT picked it up, no questions asked. Photo by VRT
The journalists were turned away when they first inquired at a shop where they were tipped off hawala transfers could be arranged. But soon they found a Facebook profile offering transactions to Gaza in Palestine, at a slightly lower exchange rate than the official one. At an agreed meeting point on the street, the journalists handed over 250 euros in cash and asked when it would reach the recipient. “The money is already there,” the hawaladar reassured them. “Now he can go shopping, to the market. Wherever he goes, he can pay normally now.”
Back in the Gaza strip, another journalist was on standby to collect the money. When he showed up at the agreed location, he was handed the agreed amount in Israeli shekels without further enquiries. Reporters from RTBF made a transfer in the opposite direction: A journalist in Damascus (Syria) sent the equivalent of 500 euros to Belgium, which was picked up hours later by an RTBF journalist in the heart of Brussels, handed out by a man in the street. There was no official record of the transaction or any documentation required.
Thousands of transactions like this happen every day in Europe, mostly to the Middle East and Africa, according to interviews with migrants in different points of Europe. “I have already sent money to Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and the Ivory Coast too”, said a man from Cameroon in Brussels. The users find hawala faster, easier and sometimes cheaper than regular banks. “We trust him (the hawaladar) because when we give him money, he sends it and delivers it quickly.” said a woman from Mauritania, “When there are mothers or families, they need to help the families to eat, to study”. Thomas Incalza, professor of corporate criminal law at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium said countries like these are "very difficult to involve in the regular financial network, yet many in these countries are almost entirely dependent on remittances from family members in the West.”
Cash-sniffing dogs at the Brussels Zaventem airport, part of the anti-money laundering measures designed to stop unregulated cash flows. Photo by VRT
International anti-money laundering regulations have tightened in recent years, as governments targeted funds of illegal origin or those destined to finance terrorism. This has translated into stricter controls at banks and companies like Western Union or MoneyGram. Requirements for transactions now include documentation from the sender, proof of the source of the funds and transfer amount limits. Hawaladars will only work with clients vouched for by a trusted partner; after that, no questions asked. “They’re there for the money,” said Quentin Mugg, a French police superintendent and author of a book on hawala. “Whether the money comes from migrant smuggling, human trafficking, pimping, a grandmother sending her savings for her son’s birthday, or a Malian working in France supporting his family, they couldn’t care less,” Mugg said. “They’ll apply their rates. And they’ll carry out their transfer operations. Besides, they don’t want to know what they don’t want to know. It’s part of their defence strategy.”
Outside the regulated money transfer markets, hawaladars in Europe need little more than a phone and a notebook to carry out hundreds of transactions daily from the back rooms of sham businesses in cities and towns all over Europe. They offer a portfolio of services ranging from immediate international transfers to currency exchange or tax fraud, charging a commission for each operation that can go from one to 30 percent depending on the amount, the destination and the risk involved. “Our experience is that the majority of the money is of illegal origin,” said Sebastian Goebels, from the German State Criminal Police and head of a hawala task force, “with the proportion of 'supposedly legal' transfers being vanishingly small.”
Hawala is also used at scale through secretive criminal networks operating in encrypted messaging platforms. Journalists from VRT and RTBF gained exclusive access to the thousands of pages of a 2024 case in Brussels Criminal Court which for the first time offered a close look into a large hawala network with Europe-based members and a global footprint. Initially, public investigators were following the Belgian links of a case concerning “fundraising campaigns by French prisoners for members of Islamic State (ISIS) still present in Syria and Iraq,” according to Vincent Guerra, the federale magistraat (prosecutor) in charge of the four-year long investigation. Following the money trail, authorities accessed the phone of someone nicknamed “Abou Adam”, a Belgian hawala broker they suspected was responsible for the transfers to Syria. “And it was a whole galaxy that opened up with that phone,” said Guerra, “we came across tens and tens of thousands of messages on the hawala network. We entered a completely different dimension, and we realized that the terrorist financing operations were just a drop in an ocean of transactions.”
By cracking into Abou Adam’s phone they collected more than 100,000 messages exchanged during a period of nine months, which offered a minute-by-minute rundown of the operations of a high-level hawala network.
The "Traders of Greater Europe" was a private WhatsApp group where 532 hawaladars discussed transfers in dozens of countries around the world. This graphic reproduces just a few of the 82,000 messages exchanged by the group, and shows countries involved in the transactions, according to court records. Graphic: EBU
In a private WhatsApp group with the name “The Traders of Greater Europe”, reserved for trades of over 5,000 euros, 532 hawaladars sent more than 82,000 short messages to offer and request money transfers. The answers came almost immediately, with another member accepting the deal and stating his commission for the operation, usually between one and seven percent. “We’re talking about hundreds of millions of euros or dollars circulating over the course of a few months,” said the prosecutor Guerra. “It’s the real deal. A few of the countries mentioned in the messages - Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Malta, Greece, Lithuania, England, Yemen, Kurdistan, Turkey, Libya, Lebanon, Dubai, Syria, Oman, Malaysia, Brazil, Egypt, Russia, the United States - and in the major countries, several locations per town or city. So we cover the entire planet, to give you an idea of the scale of it.”
In November 2024 Abou Adam and five other Palestinian men were convicted in criminal court for breaking banking regulations, participation in criminal organization, and money laundering. Two of them were also found guilty of terror financing. They received sentences of up to eight years in prison.
There was “no evidence of violence” in the findings of the Belgian court case, according to the prosecutor Guerra, who described the group’s activities as equivalent to those of “white-collar crime”. Hawaladars like to keep the violent crimes behind the cash they handle at arm's length. However, this becomes harder when the money comes from migrant smuggling.
Trial in Austria of two Syrian brothers, who ran hawala operations from a restaurant in Vienna and were convicted of human trafficking, destruction of documents and grievous bodily harm. Photo by ORF
In a July 2025 case in Austria, law enforcement dismantled what they called “the biggest hawala office in Vienna”, run from a Middle Eastern restaurant on a busy street near the city center. Two Syrian brothers running the operation were charged with human trafficking, destruction of documents and grievous bodily harm, for the torture and rape of a hawala courier who lost 350,000 euros, saying he had been robbed. The accused were convicted and sentenced to 18 and eight years in prison, where they are currently awaiting the result of their appeal.
Another recent operation in Austria, in coordination with Europol, dismantled a human smuggling ring financed through hawala, which law enforcement said was behind the transfer of around 100,000 people into Europe over a period of 18 months. “If we extrapolate that, the entire network has made more than a billion euros in criminal profits from human trafficking over the years, and then you can work out that we’re talking about billions worldwide,” said Gerald Tatzgern, who runs investigations on human trafficking at the Austrian Federal Criminal Police.
Vienna's "biggest hawala office", according to Austrian police, was run out of a kebab restaurant near the city center. Photo by ORF
Hawaladars also play a key role in the migrant smuggling world, authorities said, by keeping the migrants’ payments blocked until there is proof of their safe arrival. “It’s a sort of life insurance, an escrow system,” Tatzgern said, “they're not just crammed into a truck because if the migrant dies, the smuggler gets nothing for it, since the trustee receives no confirmation or proof that the smuggler successfully completed the operation.”
Just like in any other growing economic activity, technology and globalization are part of the business strategy, as “Orontes”, a recent police operation against human trafficking in Spain showed. Europol said it was the first instance they had seen of an Arab and a Chinese network working together, with cryptocurrency being used as the payment method between brokers. The smugglers’ ring offered a “VIP service” which, for a cost of up to 20,000 euros per person, gave migrants the chance to arrive from Syria via Algeria into the coast of Almería in Spain in speedboats, and guaranteed undetected passage to their final destinations in European countries such as Spain, Germany, France and Norway, among others.
The Syrian trafficker heading the operation in Spain worked with a Belgium-based hawaladar, who sent him the cash via a network of Chinese brokers in Madrid. The money was collected from local Chinese bazaars, and the broker was paid back by the Belgian hawaladar in cryptocurrency. Some of the profits “were introduced into the legal market through the purchase of certain goods such as handbags, cigars or other types of goods, vehicles and so on,” said Eduardo Alonso, Inspector at the Spanish Central Unit for Economic and Fiscal Crime. The rest ended up in Chinese bank accounts, he said. “The problem we encounter is the opacity of these lax territories and the lack of cooperation with banking controls, which makes it quite difficult for us,” Alonso explained.
"We are seeing that it's booming. Non-existent 10 years ago but on the rise in the last five years. Analyses show that it is certainly worrying, because 75% of VAT fraud is accounted for by this hawala system."
Francis Adyns, spokesperson for Belgian Special Tax Inspectorate
Migrant smuggling and drug trafficking are cash-intensive activities. As part of their portfolio of financial services, the hawaladars will also dispose of these bags of banknotes. “You collect a lot of money, because you intend to resell it,” said Quentin Mugg, a French police expert on hawala. “Well, who are you going to sell it to? Probably to other criminals, but not only to them. Also, to white-collar criminals. Because ultimately, the only activity that can compare with and surpass drug trafficking, for example, is tax fraud. And there you have a virtually inexhaustible pool of people who possess good qualities in the eyes of a hawaladar because they don’t want people talking too much about them.”
In a recent case, money from "invoice factories" was used to pay undeclared workers for renovations at the police headquarters in Copenhagen. Photo by DR
Hawala money enters the formal economy through collaboration with these white-collar criminals and their “invoice factories” or shell companies. These are front businesses with no real economic activity, created with the purpose of generating paperwork to cover cash payments made off the books or to launder funds from illicit origin by making regular bank transfers. As the head of one of these shell companies, Frank facilitated this process with fake invoices. "You send an invoice to a building firm who needs cash to pay his undeclared workers,” Frank explained, “and he transfers the money to you digitally via the bank. Then you get the cash delivered from the hawala network, take your percentage and give it to the building company, so he can pay his employees in cash.” By paying in cash and without a work contract, the company avoids paying VAT and other taxes related to workers’ employment. Frank’s invoices justify the transaction. In this way, cash from drug and human smuggling that the hawaladar collected starts to flow into the formal economy.
The transactions analyzed by the investigative team included thousands of payments from shell companies to legitimate European companies. Photo by VRT
The use of hawala money for these purposes is “booming,” according to Francis Adyns, spokesperson for the Belgian Special Tax Inspectorate. “Non-existent 10 years ago, but now on the rise in the last five years. Analyses show that it is certainly worrying, because 75% of VAT fraud is accounted for by this hawala system,” Adyns said.
In exchange for fake invoices, these shell companies receive money into their bank accounts, which is quickly sent abroad through payments commissioned by the hawala network. These are known as third-party payments, where the shell companies act as intermediary payers on behalf of legitimate businesses located in countries under sanctions or flagged as risky by the international financial institutions. “A third-party payer system, as such, is not illegal,” said Thomas Incalza, professor of criminal law at Leuven University, who likens it to services like PayPal, “but it is attractive as a form of money laundering.”
The team of journalists working for Danish broadcaster DR on this investigation have spent years digging through trustee reports, court and police records and other confidential sources from this “invoice factory” world. As a result, they have compiled a list of 23,000 transactions carried out by 98 invoice factories in Denmark, involving funds from hawala brokers, and in thousands of cases, destined for legitimate European companies.
Frank charged a 3.5 percent commission for turning hawala cash into payments for goods supplied by all sorts of legitimate European companies selling to the Middle East. “It could be anything from a pig factory to sunflower seeds or pine nuts, or something like that, and I paid that invoice, and the same day I could drive out and pick up the money.” Frank would then sell that cash, for example to a new client looking to make payments off the books, and the cycle of money laundering would be complete.
Henrik Sjørslev, lawyer and court-appointed trustee for several Danish invoice factories. Photo by DR
The companies receiving third-party payments are “an absolutely necessary instrumental piece in making this underground banking system work,” according to Henrik Sjørslev, a lawyer at DLA Piper Global Law Firm. Sjørslev is also the court-appointed trustee for several invoice factories, charged with recovering as many of their assets as he can to repay the taxes these companies owe the Danish treasury when they close. “It is essential to begin where the possibilities of stopping this are the greatest, namely with the companies that have the resources to see through this, figure this out and set up barriers to prevent this from happening,” he said.
The invoice factories have a short lifespan, to avoid scrutiny and limit the paper trail, and once they have operated for a while they empty their accounts, close down and a similar one is set up under a new name. “The scale of these transactions is enormous,” said the trustee. “Both when you look at the scale, but also at how the cash flows are directed,” said the trustee Sjørslev, “there is an element of very significant coordination behind this, in order for it to be possible” The Danish Financial Intelligence Unit estimates that more than 800 million euros were funneled out of Denmark through invoice factories over the past ten years, according to their latest report.
- All over the continent, "invoice factories" or shell companies are working with the international hawala network to launder money, commit VAT and other tax fraud and facilitate sanctions evasion. This is just one real example which illustrates the thousands of third-party payments documented in our investigation. The managers of both companies involved have confirmed our findings.
- A steel company in Syria wants to buy supplies from a Belgian provider. The Belgian provider agrees to the sale.
- The Syrian company places an order for 100,000 EUR worth of steel with the Belgian company, but they cannot make a bank payment as Syria is under economic sanctions at the time.
- To bypass the restrictions in the formal banking system, the Syrian company reaches out to a known hawaladar in the region. They are instructed to deliver the order amount in cash, in Syrian pounds, to a money exchange company in Damascus.
- The money is then transported from Syria to Gaziantep, in Turkey, where the hawaladar has his base.
- The hawaladar, through his international hawala network, asks a Danish "invoice factory" or shell company, registered as a legitimate business, to make the payment to the Belgian company.
- The "invoice factory" makes three bank transfers from Denmark to Belgium, for a total amount of 100,000 euros. For the Belgian company this appears as a third-party payment, a common practice that is not illegal but that is abused in thousands of cases like this to launder money, commit VAT and other tax fraud or evade international sanctions.
- The Belgian company sends the steel goods to Syria. Currently, both companies are in a court case over similar payments through a shell company.
The Syrian steel importer, who requested to stay anonymous, gave DR reporters the name of the Turkey-based hawaladar. He identified him as a Syrian national, whose name also appears in documented transactions to Danish invoice factories, and in the Turkish corporate registry as the owner of two companies, one located in the heart of hawala trade in Istanbul’s Fatih area, and one in Gaziantep, near the Syrian border. According to the Syrian businessman, this hawala broker is still active, and has been operating out of Turkey since the years of the Syrian civil war. “Merchants and large capital owners who trusted him kept deposits with him,” the steel importer said, “and these deposits were in the millions! There were many people who were afraid for their money during the war, the fleeing, and the bombings, so many trusted no one but him to hold their money. Of course, he doesn't just leave the money locked away; he invests it and puts it into circulation for his own benefit.” When DR reporters called the hawaladar’s office, the person answering the call confirmed that money transfers from Turkey to Europe could be arranged, but when he was reached on his phone, he denied any knowledge of the transactions, or any involvement with the Syrian steel company. The Turkish government left unanswered repeated requests by reporters for a press visa to report on the hawala networks on the ground in Turkey.
The city of Gaziantep in Turkey, the base of one of the hawaladars identified in this investigation. The Turkish government left unanswered repeated requests for a press visa to report on hawala brokers in Turkey. Photo by DR
“In Spain and Europe, we have key people, who also control the structures inside the countries,” said Fernando Sanz Ayuso, Chief inspector of the Spanish police’s Money Laundering Brigade, “but the main hawaladars or brokers are usually outside Spain and outside Europe. We are talking about the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Southeast Asia, which is where the main heads controlling this would be.” These are jurisdictions where hawala is legal or tolerated, and where European police are struggling to build cooperation. “Law enforcement needs to become as agile and borderless as the criminals. And in order to do that, we need to cooperate,” said Lucy Myles of Europol, “we need new relationships with jurisdictions where criminals providing these services are operating so we can work with them and work with the EU countries to disrupt and dismantle the organizations.”
Daniel Kinahan, accused of being the head of one of the world's largest criminal organizations, lived in Dubai for ten years before he was finally extradited to Ireland in early August 2026. The Irish government had long worked to obtain an extradition treaty with the UAE, eventually signing a bilateral agreement in 2024. The Kinahan cartel is known for using hawala to finance its operations, which include drugs and arms trafficking, and murder, according to the US State Department. The gang's alleged main money launderer Johnny Morrissey, nicknamed "Johnny Cash", is living in Spain's Costa del Sol awaiting trial, accused by Europol of using hawala to launder 200 million euros in less than 18 months, an average of more than 350,000 euros a day. "Movement of criminal finances is the heart of organized crime," said Myles. "I have read it in encrypted communication chats, where criminals have openly admitted that their money broker controls everything, they say that they are the heart of their organization. If you disrupt and dismantle these networks, you are crippling organized crime. You are hitting them really where it hurts. And this is our ultimate goal."
The reporting group in Copenhagen. Photo by DR
Reporting team: Kasper Vilsmark, Jens Langhorn, Niels Sandøe, Louise Hummelmose Nielsen (DR, Denmark); Victor Van Driessche, Débora Votquenne (VRT, Belgium); Romane Bonnemé, Guillaume Wollner (RTBF, Belgium); Pilar Requena (RTVE, Spain); Christoph Bendas (ORF, Austria); Luc Martinon, Lili Rutai (EBU).
Text and project coordination: Belén López Garrido (EBU)
Sub-editor: Kate de Pury (EBU)
Originally published on 30 August 2026. Read the original report here
An article written by Investigative Journalism Network (EBU_IJN), initially published on 31 August 2026, 10:34 (CEST)