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.

@Danikm151 Here you go some very happy sniffer dogs...

Bob Shop raid

Maybe that Turkish place was just a bit more concerned about keeping up a legitimate appearance than other similar places? Why the constant refurbs though, are they part of the money laundering scheme?
I find it so depressing. I know genuine business owners who put their heart and soul into their work, and then you get people who just put up a half-arsed pseudo business front and launder money in plain sight.

We have one of these too. Either dairy or gluten free, can’t remember, but they definitely look somewhat out of place on a otherwise derelict high street.

It's hard to tell which are legit, though. I always used to avoid the dodgy looking car wash in an industrial unit near my office (worrying more about the staff being trafficked than money-laundering), and go to the large prominent one on the main road instead.

Guess which one got raided and found to have loads of trafficked Romanians...

Just wondered if any MNs living in France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain or even Australia have noticed the same. Is this just a UK thing?

Gosh , I feel a bit thick reading this! Visit UK (NW) yearly and up until now , apart from the multiple Vietnamese nail bars ( which I knew where probably trafficked women ) it never occurred to me what these empty , ever changing shops meant! My eyes have been opened!

I visit Barcelona about 5 times a year and don't see these cafes and barber shops but then they dont seem to have the people that open these in such numbers as the uk and also the police would be much more pro active as they do patrol the streets so anything dodgy would be reported etc.

Since I started the thread, the barbers has had yet another refurb so its all looking very flash and glitzy with massive tele's and sofas and lighting....and the candy store is still selling fake and duty free tobacco openly despite being reported. The other mafia cafe is mostly empty and often some one using it, just plonks a huge merc or bmw on the pavement so its blocked for wheelchair users etc !

The fake Italian cafe is again always empty and has never any customers, we expect that to have a full refurb again in a few weeks.....Seems this is all over the UK from reading the posts. Depressing.

sounds like our high st, but they dont seem to have taken over the corner shops...yet....i wouldn't engage with them at all and best avoided, there is a reason that group and mafia now runs 95% of all uk drugs and cities..totally ruthless.

Why do they have to be in the UK in the first place and why isn't being cracked down on

Very worrying

@greengreengrass25

Why do they have to be in the UK in the first place and why isn't being cracked down on

Because something about diversity and strength. Apparently.

Yes it's crap

my estate agent friend handled a few of the lettings in our area, the clients were all Albanian with Italian passports or British, a lot came over and pretended to be kosovan refugees and got nationality that way also.

A toxic combo of New Labour's naivety about open borders and George Osborne quietly destroying civil society by depriving local authorities, border authorities, and the police of cash.

I think the rot started a lot earlier than that. I'd go right back to the formation of the CPS and the 1984 PACE Act. Before that time, police would do their own prosecutions of less serious crimes, along with traditional "beat bobbies" who worked their own community so were far better aware of their "patch", would notice unusual people/things happening, etc. It would be the sergeant who'd decide what actions to take on minor crimes, based on the PCs recommendation, so they'd give warnings/cautions for minor things, and then prosecute repeat offenders or more serious things. All that local knowledge and discretion was chucked aside with PACE and the CPS as it became the CPS who decided on prosecution and had a very liberal attitude and chose not to prosecute all kinds of low level offence because it was suddenly too expensive etc (hardly surprising when a small army of admins and qualified solicitors became involved in minor offences that previously required a few minutes of local magistrate's time and an hour of a sergeant's time!).

The same kind of "looking the other way" applies to lots of other public sector entities too - i.e. HMRC., who used to inspect the books of small businesses every few years, but now don't do random inspections anymore - again, "too expensive" so they centralise and concentrate on specific task forces.

When relatively low level "crimes" are tolerated or ignored, it's no surprise that we're suffering a wave of criminality as people are accustomed to getting away with it. It's also very annoying that things like speed cameras, automatic parking fines, etc., have been widely introduced at the same time, so generally "innocent" people are automatically fined for minor transgressions when far more serious criminals are allowed to run free.

Yes definitely

Most people are honest and they get penalised for quite trivial things in comparison

Also the people money laundering have the advantage of overseas contacts or being able to disappear if things get heavy

They also have the advantage of simply changing their identity using false/fraudulent documents such as fake passports, shared driving licences, etc., so whilst they appear to disappear, assumed to have left the country, many will still be here, still doing the same, but under a new name/identity.

One of my clients easily created a second identity, had bank and credit cards in a different name, etc. I noticed it because some of his credit card receipts were in a different name so initially I assumed it was a new member of staff buying things on their own personal card, but it soon became apparent he'd created a new identity for himself. When I asked him about it, he claimed racism meant he needed a "British" name! A few years later, he was in the local paper accused of money laundering, modern slavery, etc in his takeaway (apparently staff were forced to live in bunk beds and mattresses on the floor in the storeroom above the takeaway). He got sent down for a year or two. Then after his release, the company house records showed a new owner for his takeaway - guess what? It was his fake British name - so he just carried on running it, but under his fake name!!

@taxguru

Your comments are bang on.

There's a lot of naivety on MN as to what actually goes on in the real world.

@taxguru ahh phoenixing. Very common in the small business world and the bane of utility companies lives

our local nail bar is run by vietnamese people and they're all men. I've only ever seen one woman, who seems to do the pedicures. And about a dozen men who do the nails.
It's cash only.
Are they just money laundering rather than people trafficking?

True, and not only on MN.
Someone posted about the ridiculous numbers of barber shops and American candy stores on our local FB page and one of the responses was “Well, people must be using them, so what’s the problem? Why don’t you support local business? Is it because the owners aren’t English?” 🙄
People might be using them alright, not to buy American sweets though.

Yes, agree. I work in an urgent care centre and A&E in the inner city. Some MNetters inhabit an entirely different world from many of my patients.

My council have sent me this link to report suspicious shops. I don't think it's for civilians though, crimestoppers might be better.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-report-suspicious-activities

Think I've discovered another. DS really wanted a bubble tea last night so I agreed we'd go after he'd done his homework and completed his chores. Not one we'd been to before but thought we'd give it a go...

No bubbles (tapioca or whatever it is) no milk only fruit ones... and a very unengaged member of staff who didn't exactly seem pleased to see us and was even less pleased when I said we'd go to the one down the road as they didn't have what we wanted... i.e. bubble tea

There's a group in my town (think they're Albanian or Romanian) who run a car wash, always nice cars parked there.
They also renovated an old pub into a lovely restaurant (which actually is good food but rarely packed).

A few years ago they bought a run down hotel and not much seems to be happening with it all, apart from a few cosmetic bits. They certainly don't seem in any rush to open it.

I am so naive I never even thought it might be dodgy before this thread! 😂