WhatsApp money launderers moved hundreds of millions in euros funding crime and extremism

In late 2022, a Belgian judge named Vincent Guerra was investigating terror financing when he stumbled onto something far larger than he expected. A phone seized from a man called Abu Adam, who ran a money-laundering network out of Brussels, contained a WhatsApp group chat with 532 members. The group, titled "Traders of Greater Europe," had generated more than 82,000 messages over ten months. What Guerra found inside was the operational blueprint of a vast underground banking system that had moved hundreds of millions of euros across borders with no electronic trail, no bank records, no oversight—just encrypted messages and cash.

The group used an ancient method called hawala, a system of trusted money brokers that has existed for centuries and works like this: a broker in one city receives cash from a client, takes a commission, and contacts a broker in another city who then pays out the same amount to a recipient. The two brokers settle their accounts later, often through future transactions. No money physically crosses borders. No banks are involved. For immigrant workers sending money home to families in countries without reliable banking infrastructure, hawala is legitimate and practical. For criminals, it is invisible.

The messages in the Traders group were written in Arabic and reserved for transactions larger than 5,000 euros. Abu Adam, the network head, had stored 6,000 photographs of five-euro notes showing serial numbers and 6,000 photographs of identity cards—details used as unique codes in hawala transactions. Guerra calculated that Abu Adam alone had processed at least 12,000 transactions. One case the investigators documented involved payments from Brussels routed to Islamic State militants in Syria, money intended to help the wives of fighters escape from detention camps. When Guerra described what he found, he called it "hitting the jackpot." He also said something else: "This isn't just amateur work; it's professional, and at a level we could never have imagined. They're bankers with no government oversight."

The investigation, conducted by the European Broadcasting Union's network of journalists including the BBC, revealed that the Traders group was not an isolated operation. A former money launderer, identified only as Frank, told investigators he had personally handled transactions totalling several hundred million euros through European hawala networks. His first exposure came at an office outside Rotterdam, where five or six couriers arrived within ninety minutes carrying at least a million euros in cash. "What I found out later," Frank said, "is that it's not just about money. It's about the financing of terror. It's about drug trafficking. It's about prostitution and all sorts of other crap."

In Vienna, Austrian police raided what they called the largest hawala office in the city, operating from a kebab restaurant on a main street. Two Syrian brothers ran the operation and were convicted of human trafficking, torture, and rape. They had tortured a courier who claimed to have lost 350,000 euros, and the brothers were sentenced to 18 and 8 years in prison respectively. In another case, Austrian authorities dismantled a people-smuggling ring financed through hawala that had transported approximately 100,000 people into Europe over eighteen months. Gerald Tatzgern, who leads human-trafficking investigations for Austria's Criminal Intelligence Service, explained that torture was used systematically to maximize profits. Videos of the abuse were sent to families with demands for additional payments—another thousand euros, or several thousand—with threats that their son, brother, or father would suffer if the money did not arrive. Those payments came through hawala.

Hawala is illegal in most European Union countries but remains legal in the UK as long as brokers register with Revenue and Customs. Quentin Mugg, a police commander and Europol liaison officer who has led multiple money-laundering investigations, described hawala as "the primary money-laundering channel for organised crime." He noted that the brokers operating these networks are indifferent to the source of the funds flowing through their hands. "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, they couldn't care less," Mugg said. "And they'll apply their rates." The Traders of Greater Europe group chat, discovered in a 2024 Belgian court case that convicted six money launderers including Abu Adam, revealed not a criminal anomaly but a functioning parallel financial system operating at scale across the continent, moving money for terror, drugs, exploitation, and profit with no paper trail and no way for authorities to follow the flow.