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.

Shitty end of n Wales. We have barbers, vape shops, Thai massage x 2(one of which offers happy endings), numerous businesses which constantly change shop front but are never, ever open. It's depressing as fuck. The only actual shops are a savers, home bargain, bargain booze. Couple of cafes too, but not sure if anyone goes in them.

Yep, overheads cut by not having to buy stock to sell. But there are other types of money laundering that sell things as well as services. A common one is sandwich shops where the bread/rolls and an assortment of cheap fillings from discount supermarkets means you can "sell" something for a fiver that has only cost you 50p in ingredients (of course, reality is most of the food goes into waste as they're usually such crap places no "normal" person would buy a sandwich there) But they don't need customers for money laundering - they just need to have what looks like a genuine business. Of course, they'd probably do "over the counter" sale of drugs too, i.e. have some kind of code so that if you go in for, say, a corned beef on white, you'd get a little sachet of something in the bag when you hand over your £50! We had one near us that was eventually raided and the owners convicted of drug dealing and money laundering - it was a right dump of a sandwich shop - the sort where you'd go in once and never again, but the owners were always parked outside in their brand new supercars! Took police about a decade to cotton on to what was happening - they can be pretty dense and oblivious!

Mobile phone repair and phone cover shops are also usually money laundering. You can buy those phone covers for pennies from China so, again, little cost of stock so it doesn't really matter if you sell any or not - it's the image of being a genuine business. Phone unlocking and simple repairs are also very easy to learn (it's all on YouTube) with minimal costs of tools (bought from Ebay), so they can do the simple stuff genuinely, but put through loads of "cash" from pretend customers as well.

Convenience stores is also a good one - buy a van load of cheap non branded crisps, sweets, canned drinks, etc from the wholesaler and you've filled a shop for next to nothing. At the same time, you make a token gesture to sell real things to real people, i.e. a scattering of branded goods (coke cans, kit kats, etc), maybe newspapers (on sale or return), and you've got a half genuine/half artificial business where there may be some genuine customers (despite grumpy disinterested staff), but mostly piles of cash being put through the books in the back office pretending to sell all the non branded cheap crap, which probably ends up in the waste once it's gone out of date.

So it's either by "employing" slaves or illegal immigrants and giving them minimal wages, or by buying cheap wholesale goods. Either way, overheads are low, but that's fine because they create high margin businesses with minimal overheads - ideal for money laundering!

Such a shame that Brown merged the tax departments, closed down town centre tax offices, and made loads of experienced tax inspectors redundant. If you go back to 20-40 years ago, tax inspectors would routinely go to small businesses to check their books, and they were really good at spotting "peculiarities", knew the type of business to target, etc., mostly due to local knowledge as they lived in the area they worked. It was a real deterrent when a business owner knew they'd get a tax inspector looking through their paperwork etc every few years. All that's gone, so these dodgy businesses have no one checking things over and looking for red flags. Not only is the tax evasion in the black economy getting worse every year, all the money laundering is so blindingly obvious, and there's no one flagging it up and dealing with it.

Not sure if there are any dodgy shops - I tend to be a bit oblivious
to things like that. However one of our towns is doing ok, although it has lost a few big names since Covid. The other town has pretty much nothing useful left. The clothes shops, shoe shops, etc have all closed down. You cant buy necessities except from the supermarkets without travelling elsewhere. There are loads of beauty shops and places to eat. A few pound shops and charity shops but nothing really to spend an afternoon browsing.

Beauty salons with no customers and don't cut hair even though they have at least one hairdresser's sink

Plastic-ky, multicoloured shops selling squishmallows, vapes and sweets

Barbers - oh so many 'Turkish' barbers with no customers

Beauty supply shops , not hairdressers' wholesalers, but selling the same stuff - wigs, hair pieces, perms, straighteners ect

Restaurants that never open after closing for refurbishment

The same shop rapidly undergoing a variety of different guises - groceries, café, restaurant, vape shop, sweets/candies - all after expensive refits and not even staying open for a year before the builders come in again

Tatty clothes shops that never get around to putting up a permanent shop sign - just a vinyl printed tarp being held up with cable ties and selling a never ending supply of neon coloured 'cheap tart' style clothing, before shutting down, replacing the tarp and rearranging the neon bandages to open again

Shame they can't bring this back

We have a mobile phone shop that sells mainly cases plus does repairs. Never busy. Sells a few reconditioned mobiles in the front window. The sort of place you rarely get a receipt. Makes you wonder. Been open for years with quite poor reviews.

Nothing like that round here. They would stick out like a sore thumb.

It is, but they're obsessed with "task forces" where so-called specialist teams target certain types of business in certain locations, but there are so few of them, it's just more of a "smoke and mirror" warning than anything else.

It's the same with police, "normal" police don't do routine stuff anymore, like cars going through red traffic lights, parking, speeding, etc., only "specialist" teams do special "ops" very occasionally to target that kind of thing.

We desperately need to get "local" law enforcers back doing a wide variety of "local" things, but it's just not trendy for public services to do routine stuff.

Same with the police. The 'bobbies on the beat' knew their areas really well, were alert to anything out of place or illogical, and would do some checking up.

I like to think of them striding into nail bars, going "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, what's goin' on 'ere, then?" but I imagine the reality was more like document searches and quiet chats with the local dealers 😄

Now they send a couple of juniors for a fortnightly walkabout to, supposedly, reassure the public. They lack experience, background knowledge and presence, but experienced officers are far too thinly spread these days - as I'm sure any slave-holding, trafficking, murdering money launderer would cheerfully agree.

@taxguru, I'm not sure it's about what's trendy, though I see what you mean! Services are so under-resourced that they have to focus on priority issues, in much the same way as an overstretched household budget has to be strictly allocated. We could debate the ways in which it's done, but it still comes down to insufficient capacity.

Something I read earlier reminded me that effectiveness requires 'redundancy' - spare capacity. It's an absolute given in computing. In the rest of the world, effectiveness has been wrongly conflated with efficiency: it's efficient to run a lean operation with minimal infrastructure, but that makes it fragile.

The police operate completely differently. They know about these places but resources are directed gk those at the top of crime trees

Honestly I don't think they do. The top of the tree family in my area are all in prison for murder now, but it took at least 10 years to get that far. Their businesses are being run by another lot now. The Shisha bar in particular has been dealing heroin for over 20 years. Everybody knows.

Yes, I was just thinking yesterday, as a cyclist nearly flattened me on the ‘pedestrianised’ main shopping street of a major city, that I genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw the police intervening to prevent petty crimes/enforce public safety.

I work with the emergency services and I’ve met a lot of great police officers, but something has gone very wrong with law enforcement policy- not helped by large cuts .

A Turkish restaurant at the end of our road served delicious food, despite the expensive refit and people telling me it was a money laundering operation. It then closed down, had a really expensive refurb again and re-opened, but again the food was amazing. It has now closed again much to my disappointment. I believe it is a money laundering place, but it still clearly had a chef who cared about making good food. Luckily there are only a few obvious places near me. A vape shop and a shisha restaurant and a very weird, flashy African bar/restaurant with blacked out windows that has never had a customer as far as I’ve seen. Lots of locally run normal shops too. Some of the high streets being described on this thread sound depressingly bad.

Not sure really. Our local police were all over Facebook posting about a cannabis raid a few weeks ago in a derelict bank on our High Street. Apparently they'd been "tipped off" by passers by who could smell it as they passed.

So, presumably, none of the police officers who'd also passed by that derelict bank had been able to smell it? Not sure that random members of the public are known to have better sense of smell than police officers??

Or is it just that they don't know how to be proactive anymore? Are they so obsessed by targets etc that they only care about "crimes" that are actually reported and that they're instructed to deal with, and no longer think for themselves about crimes happening around them?

Funny thing, on those same Facebook posts, they asked the public to report any other premises with strong cannabis smells and were absolutely inundated with comments about probably a dozen other places, again, all in main thoroughfares, not the back end of beyond, where police officers would be walking past themselves. One was literally opposite the derelict bank they raided in a derelict shop that they then posted all over Facebook the following week after raiding that one too!

If they were genuinely only interested in the "top", surely they'd have kept quiet about the reports, started observations, and hoped to catch/trace the people involved? But no, it seems that they raided the premises almost as soon as they were reported!

So many comments on Facebook were basically telling the police just to take notice of what was happening around them, take notice of the obvious smell of cannabis plants, etc., and be proactive!

So, no, I think in most of the cases of crimes, etc., the police don't know at all, or they choose to turn a blind eye.

But most money laundering businesses ARE genuine businesses too! That's the whole point, to give an air of respectability. It's not as if all the hand car washes are just pretending to wash cars - they often have queues of cars waiting and have good reputations, but they're still laundering money. Same with Turkish barbers and mobile phone accessory shops - you can get a haircut or a new phone case as the business has to show a genuine business, i.e. buying suppliers, paying wages, etc. The busier and more popular they are, the easier it is to justify putting ever more volumes of dirty money through as they look more real! It would be a bit of an idiot to try running a money laundering operation without a genuine business at all!

We have a sushi shop nearby - Tried going in there once - it was empty except one member of staff who explained they couldn't serve me as they had "no rice".

Friend tried a few days later - out of curiosity more than anything and again they had "no rice OR fish" They did ask if she wanted anything else though

We have a weird cake shop which is all dairy free massive cakes - never seen anyone in it or know anyone who bought one. The same cakes sit there for weeks and weeks

Two weird empty cake shops in our town. Never see a soul in them, displays don't change.
We now have our second American candy shop.

I'm not sure what the role of the Police is these days. An extension of social services? A conduit between you and your insurance company?

It's a shame when we can all see stuff like this going on in plain sight and fuck all is done about it.

How many other crimes are plod completely uninterested in? Shoplifting? Uninsured drivers? Northern paedophile rings? Etc etc

What DO they do?

When they put their mind to it they can be awesome...I'm thinking of them getting all those Rolex robbers in London recently....but was that only because wealthy people with influence and sharp elbows were the victims? Hmm...

Gosh I feel very naive after reading this thread. I had my car washed at one of those cash in hand places the other week, paid about £12 and there was about 5 men all hand washing it. I came home and marvelled how they made any money at that price 😂

All these "egg free" cake shops that have popped up with sickly looking stuff in the window - no-one ever seems to use them!!

@Danikm151 The Bob Shop in Lozells was apparently raided by they cops last night. The one in Kings Heath also had a going over a few weeks back - there's a nice police video of some very enthusiastic looking dogs for the KH one

Live in a very respectable affluent town in SE . So many nail bars,Turkish barbers etc !