UNDERGROUND BANKING NETWORKS | The Investigator

Underground Banking Networks and their role in criminal activity, 23 February 2027

This workshop provides investigators with a practical overview of how underground banking, hawala and other informal value-transfer systems operate, how legitimate mechanisms can be misused by organised crime and professional money launderers, and how these networks are evolving through fintech, encrypted communications and virtual assets.

The emphasis is on understanding the movement and settlement of value, identifying investigative opportunities and recognising the interfaces between informal and regulated financial systems.

Session One: Understanding Underground Banking Networks

The opening session establishes the operational model, and the terminology investigators need to interpret underground value-transfer activity correctly.

Underground banking, hawala and other similar service providers: what they are and how they differ from conventional banking.
Legitimate remittance functions versus criminal exploitation by organised crime and professional money-laundering networks.
Trust-based broker structures, correspondent relationships, collection and pay-out mechanisms.
The professionalisation of underground banking and the development of money-laundering-as-a-service.
The emergence of 'digital hawala': encrypted messaging, fintech applications, instant payments, mobile wallets and virtual assets.

Session Two: Following the Value – Movement, Settlement and Red Flags

This session examines how value can move without a straightforward bank-to-bank transfer and how investigators can reconstruct the underlying settlement process.

Cash collection, pooling, netting and mirror-transfer mechanisms.
Settlement through trade, commercial activity, third-party payments and account networks.
Use of bank accounts, payment service providers, virtual IBANs, prepaid instruments and money-mule structures as entry and exit points.
Use of virtual assets and stablecoins for cross-border settlement between operators.
Financial, behavioural and communication indicators that can help distinguish isolated transfers from a wider underground banking network.
Practical use of link analysis, transaction chronology and multi-source intelligence to identify controllers, brokers and settlement relationships.

Session Three: Investigating and Disrupting Underground Banking

The final session applies the concepts to recent operational examples and focuses on investigative strategy.

Recent FATF and Europol case studies involving professional money laundering and underground banking networks.
Identifying the difference between the customer-facing transaction and the hidden settlement layer.
Reconstructing broker networks from financial records, communications, devices and business relationships.
Asset tracing, cross-border enquiries and the role of public-private and international cooperation.
Applied case-study exercise: developing an investigative hypothesis from fragmented financial and intelligence indicators.
Indicative contemporary source base
FATF, Investigating Professional Money Laundering, Underground Banking, and the Use of Hawala and Other Similar Service Providers (September 2026); Europol operational case material on underground banking and professional money laundering.

Held online via Teams

Certificates of CPD available

Our Expert

Antonio Rossi is a Certified Fraud Examiner with over a decade of experience in the fields of financial crime, fraud investigation, and anti-money laundering (AML).After working for ten years with a Big Four firm across Europe, he now focuses on training and advisory services for law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, private sector and international organisations.

HOW TO BOOK

Cost: £245 + VAT (GBP) per delegate per workshop (LEA and Government Agency rate). £295 + VAT (Industry rate), per delegate

Group bookings: We offer various discounts for group bookings depending on numbers, please contact us for details.

Booking: Please send the delegates name(s), email address(es) and purchase order (made out to The Investigator) to booking@the-investigator.co.uk or telephone +44(0)844 660 8707 for further information.

Payment can be made by PayPal/debit/credit card. The meeting link will be sent out 7 days before the event.