Hawala; the underground alternative
Adeel Sattar, a 24 year old Pakistani from New York, was sentenced today to 3 years imprisonment for his hawala operations. An informant working for ICE and FBI gave him $ 1.7 m to launder, which he did. By the way, he was explicitly told that the money was in fact drugs money. Adeel transferred the money to his hawala contacts in Spain and Australia through the informal hawala channels. The news articles did not mention whether Adeel had a frontstore. Neither did they mention what his take was; hawaladars are known to charge around 5% (but I have seen anything from 1% to 10%).
The hawala network (or Informal Value Transfer System as researchers tend to call it) has been in place for many many years and is probably the oldest form of banking. The last couple of years (especially after 911) law enforcement is increasing efforts to take down, or at least control, these systems because they provide an attractive, non regulated, alternative to people who want to avoid the regular banking system for whatever reason. List management and filtering can be one of these reasons (see previous post).
The harder you press the balloon on one side, the more it will bulge on the other ?
http://media-newswire.com/release_1066455.html
http://www.defac.ac.uk/journal/journal-downloads/defac_journal_hawala.pdf/view
http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive_Index/Hawala_and_Other_Informal_Value_Transfer_Systems_How_to_Regulate_Them.html
http://www.imf.org/external/np/leg/sem/2002/cdmfl/eng/wilson.pdf
