WhatsApp chat used to send cash for crime and extremism

When they arrested Abu Adam, they discovered the Traders of Greater Europe group chat on his phone.

Guerra said it was like “hitting the jackpot”, uncovering the inner workings of a vast, underground system.

The phone also contained 6,000 photos of €5 notes showing the serial numbers and 6,000 photos of identity cards.

These details are often used as unique identifying codes in hawala transactions, and the total number of notes and ID cards suggest Abu Adam had processed at least 12,000 transactions, Guerra said. “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.”The EBU also found further gangs across Europe using the hawala system for criminal activity.

One former money launderer previously involved in European hawala networks, whom we are calling Frank, told the EBU he had been involved in transactions totalling several hundred million euros.His first introduction to the hawala system had been at an office in a small town outside Rotterdam, he said.

There, five or six messengers had arrived with money in about an hour and a half, transferring at least a million euros, he estimated. “What I found out later 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, to put it nicely,” he said.Cases in Austria have also revealed how the hawala system is bound up with people smuggling and violence.

In one case investigated by Austrian broadcaster ORF, part of the EBU network, Austrian police raided what they called “the biggest hawala office in Vienna”.

It was run from a kebab restaurant on a busy thoroughfare and which authorities say was used to make payments for people smuggling.

LONDON – A WhatsApp group chat was used to send hundreds of millions of euros in cash around the world, funding organised crime and extremism with no paper trail, an investigation by European broadcasters has found.