A French-led investigation, supported by Europol, has resulted in the dismantling of a large criminal network comprising several small criminal groups involved in migrant smuggling and money laundering.
The extensive migrant smuggling and financial investigation of the French National Police (Police aux frontiers/OLTIM Roissy Charles de Gaulle) was supported nationally by the French Inter-ministerial Investigation Unit (GIR Bobigny), and Luxembourg, Portugal, the United Kingdom, among several other EU and non-EU countries.
The investigation focused on several interlinked criminal groups that were smuggling migrants from the Indian sub-continent (India, Sri Lanka and Nepal) to Europe, the United Kingdom and North America.
The smugglers facilitated migrants’ travel to the EU via Dubai or different African countries using unlawfully obtained tourist, work or medical visas. Migrants would be charged between €15,000 and €26,000 per person for the full smuggling service.
The network is believed to have smuggled several thousand people to France since 2022, providing them with flight tickets, fake documents and other resources to facilitate their illegal travel.
It is estimated that the groups generated several hundred million euros in illegal profits altogether. In 2024, French authorities arrested 26 suspects in total.
Law enforcement and judicial authorities focused heavily on the financial aspects of this case. They uncovered that the smuggling network laundered their criminal assets in multiple ways: through shell companies, hawala, and the trafficking of gold.
The network also used restaurant tickets, a system of lunch bonuses for employees widely adopted in France, for money laundering. The first action day on 12 March 2024 led to the arrest of 13 suspected smugglers and six financial brokers.
The latter was part of a hawala network suspected to have transferred annually over €50 million in criminal assets for the migrant smuggling network.
During the second action day on 25 June 2024, the French law enforcement authorities targeted two illegal gold brokers, turning over €5 million per year.
Following these actions, a Tamil priest, who was part of the network, took over the activities of the arrested hawala brokers and used the temple for the recovery of money from migrant smuggling.
He was arrested on 12 November 2024, charged, and remanded in custody.
Later that month, four others were detained for laundering over €200 million through public works companies.
Using a legitimate company as a front, the network used its ‘cleaned’ assets to expand its activities while also employing irregular migrants and paying them significantly less than the regular salaries for the sector.
