Money laundering fronts/shops/cafes...how is your high st..??

[bumblebee1000]

Just curious really.....our high street now has appx 9 cafes all have the same flashy design and interior, some have a shisha area out back. very very few customers, just the odd few, males chain smoking and glued to phones, never see any women inside or outside in smoking areas, often big expensive cars parked outside. Also have the 4 barber shops which are always empty and now have one of those american candy and vape shops, this shop sold my friend fake tobacco yesterday and offered him a load of duty free tobacco from Holland, he has reported this shop to trading standards and hmrc as threw away the tobacco. So how is your high street....is it similar ? Has anyone reported these places and seen any action. Personally find them depressing. we are in London.

I accidentally went into one andwas very bemused. Everything locally sourced, organic with a twist of chia, or made by Guatemalan peasants and all triple the proce. I literally just wanted a cold drink without Basil, Aloe or Gingko Biloba in and not a shot of ginger. Walked out empty handed but very amused. Surely people must be buying this stuff? The shop was packed with stock.

My high street appears to be run by the Albanian mafia. Every cafe, restaurant, barbers, corner shop, you name it. They stare a lot which is really unnerving when trying to grab a pint of milk! The street is lined with very nice, very expensive blacked out cars. I unwisely challenged a member in his very swanky car on his shit driving the other day (went up on a pavement and pulled around me at a junction as he deemed I was taking too long, they were all staring at me through their downed windows and I stubbornly pretended not to see so pulled out as normal) and he slammed the breaks on so hard once aligned in front of me that I nearly went straight into the back of him, so I flipped him the bird. He stayed motionless for about 30 seconds and then drove off. I realise that could have gone very much the other way if they had jumped out and was really bloody stupid of me.

My high street is full of Turkish barbers and nail bars. One of the nail bar was raided a couple of weeks ago and the owners are in trouble for modern day slavery

2 of the Turkish barbers have brothels in the flats above and they control the weed being brought into my town.

Runcorn

The idea that some foreign nationals come to the UK to commit crime is an alien concept to many MNetters.

I agree with you, and I’m an immigrant myself.
I’ve also heard people praise our ‘vibrant’ town centre, while genuine independent businesses are struggling and closing down because our high street is becoming less and less attractive to actual paying customers.

Exactly this - I’ve long been suspicious of a super-upmarket ‘cannoli bar’ which is pretty much always closed - I’ve seen it open, with one table occupied, precisely once in 18 months. It now has a neighbour a few doors up the street that sells one kind of biscuit. Not chocolate chip - that I would understand, and probably even patronize - something more esoteric that as far as I can tell has never managed to attract a single client, not even in the run-up to Christmas. I used to worry about them and their terrible business plan until I realized that that WAS the business plan.

This is what happens when you have "remote" enforcement too far away.

Like police "beat bobbies" being scrapped - they used to know their patch, and would have been able to watch and flag up ALL kinds of suspicious activity and either deal with it themselves or flag it up the chain of demand.

Like tax inspectors - used to be tax offices in every big town. They'd typically live locally so would observe new businesses opening, check they're registered for tax, after a while, check their observations matched the business records, etc.

Local knowledge was a massive part of law enforcement. But it's all been given away with centralised remote offices and there's no one casting an eye over what's really happening at a local level, letting small scale crime flourish and grow.

@Kazzyhoward I agree. They are also so thin on the ground. I know in my job colleagues turn blind eyes to things as they literally don't have capacity to deal with it all. Everyone is expected to regulate themselves these days so it's a free for all

There's a meme going round, I've tried desperately to find it but obv see it all the time apart from when I'm looking.

It's two high end cars parked out the back of a building and it's something like "saw these two cars out the back of a Turkish barbers. Who knew not cutting anyone's hair was so lucrative."

I often drive around at night seeing hundreds of barber shops open. I genuinely thought it was a great idea and wish women's hairdressers did the same... seems I was very naive.

In fairness, hairdressers with lots of Afro-Caribbean customers often open late and have done for decades. So I don't think all hair salons open in the evening are dodgy. But lots of them are.

A hair salon near where we live offers evening appointments.
When they’re open you can always see them working with actual customers, so they never struck me as dodgy 🙂

On the subject of American candy shops - apparently Labour are planning to crack down on those if they win the election.

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/25/labour-to-crack-down-on-dodgy-candy-stores-in-push-to-revive-high-streets

As well as the hairdresser* near me, as per my pp, there’s also a cafe, where I hardly ever see a customer. These are not in a high street, but in a small parade of shops in a residential area.

*Theres no way she can make enough even to pay her business rates and yet she’s been going for at least 15 years.

Next time you see a vape shop or mattress shop it’s a front 99% of the time

Why?

I guess because you don't have to buy stock to sell🤷🏼‍♀️
Well for one thing anyway. I'm sure there are some experts who can give us other reasons!

Hereford.
Barbers, vape shops and nail bars.
Slowly but surely taking over one of the main roads into town.
Also lots of others dotted all over town.
Cash only, obviously 😐

I'm no expert, but would guess it's because you can actually service 1,2 or even 0 customers, but put cash through the till as if you had serviced 10, 20... Cash is declared, all due taxes paid, it's all lovely and clean to take as drawings. As pp said, no need for stock.

I used one of those nail bars, realised halfway through what I was looking at, and gave the non-English speaking, Vietnamese girl a £20 tip on a £10 treatment. Might be something of a forlorn hope that she was allowed to keep it; it was conscience money for my unthinking support of both money laundering and trafficking/slavery 😢

I am not far from greenlanes.
The fruit crates are for the drugs and firearms.
There was a big raid a few years ago, but the police have given up now.

A street in a Ne Scottish city, 16 hairdressers, barber shops.

duty free tobacco from Holland

Maybe.

More concerned about all the cocaine coming in through Rotterdam and Antwerp harbours.

As the mayor of Amsterdam, I can see the Netherlands risks becoming a narco-state | Femke Halsema | The Guardian

Was thinking this about all the Sunbed shops near me recently. We're also coming down with sweets/dessert shops, it's all in plain sight.

I had a look in a recently opened American candy store.... £10 for a box of reese cereal. Ridiculous.

I wouldn't trust the police. They are all either corrupt or incompetent. They don't investigate any crime around us these days. Cars are stolen to order in large numbers every day of the week. They just give you a crime number. People are spending a fortune on cameras, alarms, steering locks and bollards. Some people are doing all that and putting massive chains and padlocks round their tyres. We had the CAT stolen off our car in broad daylight in the middle of the day.

Try living in Scotland, police Scotland are trialling a new policy in my home city that only certain crimes will be followed up if there is video footage or eyewitness accounts plus shutting community stations in the poorer area's where they're needed.

Couple of Turkish barbers, a few nail bars - always empty and often closed.

I suspect the local Turkish takeaway as it only takes cash.