Pakistan’s Banks May Be Missing the Real Hawala Trail


Illustration of Raast hawala monitoring showing Karachi and Muscat, linked accounts, AML review, and cross-border payment patterns between Pakistan and Oman.
Pakistani banks need to look beyond individual Raast transfers and identify transaction patterns that may connect domestic payments with hidden cross-border hawala activity.

A Pakistani bank may see a normal Raast transfer.
The transaction that explains it may have started in Muscat.

FATF’s Oman case shows how a legitimate domestic payment can sit inside a wider hawala arrangement without Raast itself being compromised.

That changes the compliance question. Banks cannot rely only on transaction value or one isolated payment.

They need to examine customer behaviour, linked accounts and unusual transfer patterns.

The harder problem appears when one bank sees only one leg of the chain while foreign investigators hold the information that gives the payment meaning.

I examine how Pakistani banks can improve Raast monitoring without making the system slower or more difficult for legitimate users.

Read the full analysis:
https://www.munaeem.org/2026/09/raast-hawala-monitoring-pakistan-banks.html