Mr. PATRICK JOST (Risk Global): Like any money transfer mechanism, hawala can be abused.
CEN, is trying to defend hawala, saying that it should be regulated but not pushed underground.
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Remittances in hard currency funnelled through hawala (Islamic word-of-mouth banks) may have more to do with it.
Called hawala in India, hundi in Pakistan and Afghanistan and chop in China, the systems share two characteristics.
As a result of regulatory and enforcement fervor, banks are making little distinction between regulated remittance and illegal hawala.
Investigators have also been exploring how terrorists use commodities and informal, trust-based ways to move money, known as hawala.
Investigators have already been exploring how terrorists use commodities and informal, trust-based ways to move money, known as hawala.
As others note, they have to use runners instead of satellite phones and the informal hawala system instead of banks.
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And in all such systems, the original sum delivered to the hawala broker never actually leaves the country of origin.
It is not plausible to simply shut down the entire hawala industry.
America recently imposed sanctions on the main Hamas-owned bank, but the informal hawala banking system that straddles the border keeps the strip solvent.
Now many hawala offices have moved and no longer accept cash.
By threatening to close their Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp accounts this week, a group representing Somali Americans has pushed the ongoing hawala remittance issue to a head.
Targeting hawala methods for transferring money will also be tricky.
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By their nature, hawala networks are hard to pin down.
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But if you were to take a look at what these people do, most of them are very decent, hardworking people, and they're using hawala to send money home.
When the editor of a Dubai newspaper sent a reporter to Quetta to cover the war in Afghanistan, he found it faster and cheaper to send expenses money through hawala.
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Particularly vexing is the kind of business Elfgeeh ran out of the Carnival French Ice Cream Supermarket: hawala, an informal money-remittance service that operates on the fringes of the global financial system.
They've arrested more than 150 people around the country, but none of those arrests has been directly linked to terrorism, and experts say the vast majority of people who use hawala are harmless.
He did it through what he says was the only means available to transfer funds to war-torn Iraq, an ancient informal system known as hawala, in which brokers move money outside the conventional banking system.
Shadowy remittance systems followed immigrants into North America and Europe, and it was quite clear, at the point in 2000 when Jost delivered a report to Interpol on the subject, that hawala had a large role in money laundering.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the New Ansari Money Exchange is a hawala run by Jan that transferred billions of dollars in and out of Afghanistan between 2007 and 2010 that was also part of a loose-knit business conglomerate that included satellite telephone companies.
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