Thread by @SmartMaticEng

The suitcases full of cash moving through Minneapolis St. Paul Airport fit the profile of a Hawala money broker settling balances in cash. What is Hawala? 🧵👇

Hawala is a network of money brokers that function like an unregulated Western Union of the Middle East and North Africa. Brokers keep large amounts of cash and communicate outside of the regulated banking system. When you wish to send money to someone in, say, Somalia, where there is little to no presence of banking institutions, a Hawaladar broker may be your only option.

Say a Hawaladar in Minneapolis has a client who requests to send $1,000 USD to Puntland, Somalia. The Hawaladar accept the cash and takes a cut (say, 3%) and contacts a Hawaladar in Puntland. They agree on an authorization method (a challenge-response phrase , authentication token, or ID pair) and provide that method to the sender. The sender provides the authorization method to the recipient, and the recipient picks up their cash from the Hawaladar in Puntland, less the service fee that both Hawaladars collect.

However, in the case of Minneapolis and Puntland, the cash balances that Hawaldars hold require constant and rapid resettlement, because the transfers are only flowing one direction (no one in Somalia is sending $1k to their cousin in Minneapolis). Therefor, cash is constantly being sent via courier to Somalia.

That is exactly what is described in this article from 2020, when COVID-19 shut down airports and Hawaldars could no longer settle their balances via courier, and therefor Somalians in Minnesota could no longer send remittances to Somalia.

In fact, the picture they use in the article is of a money transfer service next door to "Safari Transportation" that @nickshirleyy visited, which housed an "Amal Express" hawala money transfer service. Two Hawala brokers next door to each other sahanjournal.com/business-work/…

Amal Express is headquartered in Dubai and clearly services remittances from the diaspora of Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Djibouti, and other Middle East and North African countries. This is why it probably will not matter that @SecScottBessent has lowered the SAR reporting requirement $3k USD for remittances "wired" out of the country. These remittances are not "wired". They appear to be settled outside of the western banking system. x.com/RedWave_Press/…

Then there is the question of scale. AmalExpress.com appears to take electronic payment. They likely accept cash at affiliated locations as well (which Afrik Grocery aka Safari Transportation at 613 Cedar Ave, Minneapolis appears to be, though it is advertised nowhere on the internet, only on their storefront sign).

The question is: how are they getting this much cash out of the US Banking system? It's not trivial to put together $1 million dollars in cash per day. This requires a relationship and understanding with cash-in-transit companies or banks.

Finally, is any of this illegal? I don't know. Even though I'm convinced that there is an extensive Somalian organized crime network committing medicare fraud in Minneapolis, it's also true that if you have a cousin in Somalia who you want to assist financially, Hawala networks may be your only recourse.

So its almost certainly the case that legally earned and illicit funds are commingled in these suitcases that are passing through MSP airport. End of thread.