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The European Broadcasting Union investigation, which drew on reporting by the BBC and partners, exposed the Traders of Greater Europe chat that operated from late February to December 2022 with more than 82,000 messages exchanged in Arabic. Belgian investigating magistrate Vincent Guerra discovered the group on the phone of network head Abu Adam during an inquiry that began as a terrorism financing case but expanded significantly. Guerra characterised the find as hitting the jackpot because it laid bare a professional network of unregulated bankers according to the collaborative probe.
Six money launderers including Abu Adam and his deputy Abu Ahmed received convictions in the 2024 Belgian court case that made the messages available to journalists. Evidence showed Abu Adam alone processed at least 12,000 transactions often documented with photographs of euro notes and identification cards while payments reached British cities such as Birmingham and London as well as Islamic State militants in Syria. A former participant known as Frank stated in the investigation 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.
A parallel Austrian investigation featured in the reporting led to the conviction of two Syrian brothers who operated from a Vienna kebab restaurant described by authorities as the city’s biggest hawala office. The brothers received sentences of 18 and eight years respectively after they were found guilty of human trafficking alongside the torture and rape of a courier who lost 350,000 euros. Gerald Tatzgern who leads human-trafficking investigations at Austria’s Criminal Intelligence Service explained that videos of the torture are then sent to the families saying that if they don’t send another 1000 euros or several thousand euros then the person concerned will suffer.
Europol’s 2025 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report recorded 449 arrests for terrorism-related offences across 20 member states with 289 linked to jihadist terrorism that caused five deaths and 18 injuries. The report noted that cryptocurrencies have become crucial in digital hawala the modern adaptation of traditional informal transfer networks used to move funds anonymously. A separate Europol operation concluded in 2025 dismantled a hawala-crypto network that laundered more than 21 million euros resulting in 17 arrests across Spain Austria and Belgium along with seizures of cash vehicles and property.
A 2025 Financial Action Task Force assessment found that informal value transfer systems such as hawala remain widely used particularly in conflict zones offering anonymity outside regulated channels with global volumes estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The assessment highlighted increasing abuse of social media and messaging services for terrorist financing often combined with cash couriers or e-money to bypass due diligence. Europol liaison officer Quentin Mugg stated in the original investigation that the hawala system was the primary money-laundering channel for organised crime whether the money comes from migrant smuggling human trafficking or other sources.
Europol’s EMPACT operations in 2024 produced more than 13,500 arrests the identification of over 5,000 victims and the seizure of 1.05 billion euros in assets with multiple actions uncovering hawala payments tied to Syrian smuggling networks that moved approximately 100,000 people over 18 months. One such coordinated effort established a joint investigation team across several countries and led to the arrest of 25 facilitators. Guerra noted that the Belgian case represented just a drop in the ocean of transactions according to the published investigation.
