I'm curious as to why you would ask such a question. It reminds me of this book that I haven't read but might answer some of your interrogations : http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/11678
".....Suppose you wish to send $25,000 from Vancouver, British Columbia, to a friend in Helsinki, Finland. You would hand $25,000 cash to a Vancouver money changer (Hawaladar) in Vancouver, and receive code words (or an agreed signal such as a secret handshake) and a contact address in Helsinki. No actual cash moves out of Canada. Instead, when your friend gives the code to the correspondent hawaladar in helsinki, he will receive the equivalent in euros (less a commission) from money that is already there. To review:
-There are no written documents. The exchanges are based on mutual trust (perhaps for that reason unpopular in the United States?).
-Only local currencies are used. Thus, if you are sending money from the UK to Mexico, you pay in pounds and the receiver in Mexico collects in pesos.
-This exchange cannot be traced because no money crosses a border.
.........................
Wikipedia:
Hawala (Arabic: meaning transfer), also known as hundi, is an informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers, which are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. It is basically a parallel or alternative remittance system that exists or operates outside of, or parallel to traditional banking or financial channels.
I suppose the system only works as long as the net sum of all transactions arriving (+) and departing (-) any given location is zero in the long term. But I can imagine there are locations that are net payers and others that are net receivers of money. What happens then, to settle the difference?
This is straightforward, simple. The funds never cross borders. This is old, established popular exchange system. I expect there are more Hawaladars than there are brick and mortar banks. See Wikipedia.
I understand that money never needs to cross borders. But presumably this only works when there are enough local senders of money to offset the "incoming" funds to be collected by local recipients.
My question was what happens if, for example, people in Helsinki are always only recipients? The Finnish branch of the organisation is providing them with Euros, but if there are no Finnish senders of money (or more likely: the Finns as a group simply don't send as much as they receive) where do the Euros come from?
> There are no written documents. The exchanges are based on mutual trust (perhaps for that reason unpopular in the United States?).
This would make it less popular in most of the developed world, with some exceptions, including (possibly) ones in the US. It's the difference between high- and low-context cultures, with the Arab world being generally more high-context than most of the US, with the exception of the South and Texas.
In addition, some subcultures are fairly low-context even if they exist in a generally high-context culture. A "Good Old Boy's Network" is going to be low-context regardless of where it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network Exclusive? Yes. Exclusionary? Hell, yeah. Those are the costs of being able to do business on a handshake.
A friend of mine works for Child Protective Services and gets exposed to some very volatile and unstable people. He gets threats from cases he's assigned, but thankfully nothing too serious or pervasive. Now that he's got a kid on the way, he's a bit more concerned. The only thought I had was to create an alias, but I'm really not sure how someone would go about doing that.
That book might be a great start for him, but if anyone has recommendations, I'm ears.
