Secret WhatsApp Money Network Moved Hundreds of Millions Across Borders for Crime and Extremism
A private WhatsApp group with more than 500 members was used to arrange cash transfers worth hundreds of millions of euros around the world, with almost no paper trail and little official oversight. The money reached organised crime groups and, in at least one documented case, Islamic State militants in Syria, according to a joint investigation by European public broadcasters.
The group was called “Traders of Greater Europe.” It had 532 members and generated more than 82,000 messages between late February and December 2022. Members wrote to one another in Arabic to set up informal cash deals for clients in many countries, including Britain. Payments were arranged for destinations such as Birmingham and London. The room was reserved for large business only. Its own rules told members not to post offers or requests below €5,000, $5,000 or £5,000, and warned that anyone who ignored the rule would be removed. Single transfers recorded in the Belgian investigation ranged from that floor up to about €800,000. Commissions charged by the brokers typically sat between 1 per cent and 6.8 per cent.
The system they used is hawala, an old trust-based method of moving value without sending banknotes across a border or logging an electronic transfer. Two brokers, known as hawaladars, agree a deal. One collects cash from a customer in City A. The other pays out the same amount, minus commission, to a named recipient in City B. Later the brokers settle the imbalance between themselves through later trades, trade goods, or other offsets. Serial numbers on banknotes and photographs of identity cards often serve as unique codes so both sides know they are talking about the same deal.
Hawala is widely used for legitimate purposes. Migrant workers rely on it to send money home when banks are expensive, slow, or hard to reach. The same features that make it useful for families also make it attractive to criminals. It sits outside the SWIFT network that banks use for most cross-border payments. Banks are expected to flag unusual large transfers and report suspicious activity. A hawala payout can look like nothing more than cash changing hands in a shop, a restaurant, or a private office.
The practice is illegal in much of the European Union. In the United Kingdom it can be legal if the brokers register with HM Revenue and Customs. That legal patchwork helps explain why the same chat could coordinate payouts in EU cities and in British ones without a single shared regulator watching the flow.
Belgian investigators first opened the door. Federal magistrate Vincent Guerra began with a terrorism-financing case. It quickly became something larger. “It became just a drop in the ocean of transactions,” he said. The number of deals was “staggering,” and the network covered “the entire planet.” In 2024 a Belgian court convicted six money launderers, including Abu Adam, described as the head of the Brussels network, and his deputy Abu Ahmed. Belgian police had already found evidence that money from Brussels was being sent to Islamic State in Syria. The purpose, investigators said, was to help the wives of militants leave detention camps. When officers arrested Abu Adam they found the Traders of Greater Europe chat on his phone. Guerra called the discovery “hitting the jackpot.”
The phone also held about 6,000 photographs of €5 notes showing serial numbers and 6,000 photographs of identity cards. Those images are typical hawala tokens. Taken together, Guerra said, they suggested Abu Adam had processed at least 12,000 transactions. “This isn’t just amateur work; it’s professional, and at a level we could never have imagined,” he said. “They’re bankers with no government oversight.” He was also in a second WhatsApp group of about 280 brokers. Messages captured the everyday tempo of the trade: €250,000 needed in Malta, €300,000 in Brussels the same day, $800,000 in Dubai, $500,000 in Kuwait, €50,000 in Athens. Countries named in the traffic included Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Malta, Greece, Lithuania, England, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Dubai, Malaysia, Egypt, Russia, the United States and others. In larger countries the network operated city by city.
There is no evidence that every member of the group handled criminal money. Hawala mixes lawful remittances with illicit flows in the same rooms and the same chats. That mixing is part of what makes the system hard to police.
The European Broadcasting Union team, which includes the BBC, found the same informal banking method threaded through other crimes. A former participant, identified only as Frank, said he had taken part in European hawala deals totalling several hundred million euros. His first glimpse of the system was an office in a small town outside Rotterdam. In about an hour and a half, five or six messengers arrived with cash. He estimated they moved at least a million euros. Later, he said, he understood the money was not only family remittances. “It’s about the financing of terror. It’s about drug trafficking. It’s about prostitution and all sorts of other crap, to put it nicely.”
Austria showed how the same channels sit beside people smuggling and violence. Austrian police raided what they called the biggest hawala office in Vienna. It ran from a kebab restaurant on a busy street and, authorities said, processed payments for smuggling. Two Syrian brothers who ran the operation were convicted of human trafficking and of torturing and raping a courier who lost €350,000 and claimed he had been robbed. They received sentences of 18 years and eight years. Austrian police and Europol later dismantled another smuggling ring financed through hawala. Officials said it had moved about 100,000 people into Europe over 18 months.
Gerald Tatzgern, who leads human-trafficking investigations at Austria’s Criminal Intelligence Service, told partner broadcaster ORF that torture is used both as control and as a way to extract more money. “Videos of the torture are then sent to the families, saying that if they don’t send another €1,000 or several thousand euros, then the person concerned — your son, your brother, your father — will suffer.” Those extra payments, he said, were demanded through hawala.
Quentin Mugg, a police commander and Europol liaison who has led money-laundering inquiries, called hawala “the primary money-laundering channel for organised crime.” The brokers, he said, do not sort clients by morality. “Whether the money comes from migrant smuggling, human trafficking, pimping, a grandmother’s savings sent as a birthday present to her son, or a Malian working in France who wants to support his family, [the hawaladars] couldn’t care less. And they’ll apply their rates.”
The investigation does not claim that encrypted messaging created hawala. The method is centuries old. What the chat did was shrink distance and time. A network that once depended on personal introductions and delayed settlement could now post a request in a group of hundreds of professional brokers and match cash on the same day in another city. For families sending money home, that speed is a service. For investigators trying to follow terror finance, drug proceeds, or smuggling fees, it is a wall.
Guerra’s case started with a terrorism file and opened onto a parallel banking system that spans continents. The messages, the note serial numbers, and the identity-card photos show how ordinary tools — a group chat, a camera roll, a trusted contact in another city — can move vast sums without a bank ever seeing the transfer. Closing one office or convicting one cluster of brokers does not shut the table. As investigators in Belgium put it, when one player is removed, another is usually ready to take the seat.
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