Dunki 2.0 goes Crypto: hawala in Pakistan's $300 million smuggling machine

In a busy Italian town square, a man dances to a hip-shaking Punjabi song. People gather around him in delight. Two tourists take part in his vlog and lean in to kiss his cheek. Others pause, watch, smile, and move on.

On TikTok, over 1.8 million followers watch his content. Within minutes of the videos going live, the comments section explodes. WhatsApp numbers are dropped into the feed.

“Europe is my dream,” says one person. “Koi visa lagwade,” says another (Someone please help me with a visa). Another one chimes in with, “Brother, guide me on how to reach Pavia.”

Not everyone online is impressed with this dancer, however. He is accused of immorality, forgetting his roots, and giving Pakistan a “bad image abroad”. He smiles into the camera and claps back, “Saddo shareeko,” a line meant for jealous relatives watching back home.

For the young ones watching from Pakistan the Italian square, the attention, are proof that he made it which is all that matters. These yearning souls are the human grist that keeps the mill of Pakistan’s human smuggling machine running as a 80-billion-rupee industry. Social media recruits for it; cash, hawala, and cryptocurrency fund it; and smugglers now rely on valid passports to execute it.

In Gujrat’s Kharian Tehsil, 17-year-old Arif is one of these hopefuls. A pseudonym protects his identity.

In his village, migration is a rite of passage. Arif spends his nights scrolling vlogs and reels of Pakistanis abroad. “Ever since I grew up, I have wanted to go abroad,” he tells Dawn. “My relatives and villagers have also gone, but my dreams came from the lifestyle I saw online. They are living in heaven. And what are we doing here?”

The money is his first hurdle. His mother has jewelry, but his sister is getting married next year, and his father has gone into debt. He believes, however, that once he is in Belgium, it won’t be tight anymore because he will earn.

The agent he contacted online, Munawwar or Raja from Mandi Bahauddin, told Arif he could not go legally because he had failed his matriculation exams. “Toh game lagani paregi,“ he told him, using the code word for crossing borders illegally. We’ll have to game it. Of course, it was dangerous, but Arif shrugs off the risk and invokes God as his protector. Have others not succeeded after all?

Human smuggling networks are lighting up because in April 2026 Spain launched a large-scale regularisation process, offering legal status to approximately 500,000 undocumented migrants in response to a domestic labour shortage, with applications open until June 30, 2026.

The royal decree strictly applies to people already in Spain before the end of 2025 but digital feeds reaching villages in Punjab have stripped away that detail. ‘Good News for Pakistanis’ posts followed the announcement, according to Kausar Abbas of the Sustainable Social Development Organisation (SSDO), a non-governmental organisation working to combat smuggling and trafficking.

A gamble worth billions

The world outside Gujrat is negotiated as a series of calculations based on who to trust and whether the ‘Munawwars or Rajas’ of the trade can deliver. These names are aliases masking actors in a global, multi-billion-dollar industry.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) value the worldwide human smuggling market at nearly $10 billion annually. The Pakistani corridor alone has become a mini regional economy within it. The trade generates an estimated Rs80 billion ($288 million) in yearly revenue with agents charging up to Rs3.5 million ($12,600) per head, according to law-enforcement officials and researchers.

Kausar Abbas of SSDO has seen families routinely pay more than what the agents demand. In the Adriana migrant boat tragedy in 2023, in which more than 300 Pakistanis died, it turned out that each person had paid from Rs4 million to Rs8 million. For many that kind of cash only comes if you sell your land, he explains.

This financial gamble is born from a systemic “skill emergency,” according to Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute. Nearly 60 per cent of these migrants are unskilled, making them uncompetitive for formal overseas employment. As a result, the agents selling illegal routes win by default.

Journalist Aoun Sahi, who has reported on the trade, argues that these agents are rarely sketchy loners operating from the shadows, and more often than not, a part of the local scene.

Those at the top of the chain are influential locally with political and bureaucratic connections. This explains why even the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) fired some of its own officials for their involvement in the trade after the 2023 Greek boat tragedy.

The money handed over by families, often their life savings, is laundered back into the local economy through real estate, grain markets, and gold, a pattern the FATF documented in its 2022 report on money-laundering risks arising from migrant smuggling. “The state always goes after the low-hanging fruit,” he says. “But the rest of the mafia, including the businesses associated with the trade, continue to operate with impunity.”

The FATF’s 2022 report documents the chain. Families pay smugglers mainly in cash, deposited through intermediaries in small amounts and quickly withdrawn. The hawala system, operating through mini-markets, travel agencies, and mobile phone shops, receives the payment and holds it until arrival is confirmed (sometimes via videos uploaded to social media), releasing funds to the smuggler only once the crossing is complete. Dawn’s review of social media content found several cases of migrants uploading videos to announce their arrival.

Proceeds are integrated into the white economy through shops, car dealerships, restaurants, and real estate, often run by relatives recruited as front operators. In Pakistan, FIA’s Deputy Director for Immigration, Shahzad Akbar, confirms that this pattern has evolved. “They generally collect initial payments in cash from the passenger or their family, with funds transferred to overseas coordinators through informal hawala/hundi channels, which operate outside the formal banking system.“ Families are rarely provided receipts, making the trail difficult to trace.

Recent cases, Akbar tells Dawn, indicate a gradual shift toward digital payment mechanisms, particularly cryptocurrency. In one case involving Pakistani victims trapped in scam operations in Cambodia, families transferred over $5,000 each in USDT (Tether) through a cryptocurrency wallet in order to secure their release. The USDT is a digital stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.

Brokers appear to mediate between scam operations, cryptocurrency wallets, and hawala channels, which makes the financial flows more complex and difficult to investigate.

Bilal, a Pakistani migrant who made the journey through Iran and Turkiye to reach Spain and spoke to Dawn on condition of anonymity, describes payments. Out of a total deal of Rs2 million, Rs0.5 million is paid upfront in Pakistan, and at each checkpoint, a new handler takes over and collects the next instalment.

“When the money is received, they take you ahead. This is how it is done, stepwise, as you reach your checkpoints.”

Migrants are asked to pay in cash or through online bank transfers at each stage. “They don’t trust cryptocurrency,” B says. The digital currency and hawala networks operate at a different level, between agents rather than between migrants and agents. When a handler in Pakistan needs to settle with a handler in Turkiye, that is when crypto and informal transfers come into play.

The prisons of Benghazi

Tabassum Shehzad, 34, from Mandi Bahauddin, came back from Libya with nothing but debt and the memory of a prison cell.

His family scraped together Rs2.6 million ($9,350) to send him on a zigzagging route through Dubai and Saudi Arabia before he was dropped into the transit hubs of........

© Dawn Prism