Money laundering shops why no action?

[NoisySnail]

Where I live there are a number of shops that are very obvious money laundering fronts. For example a dessert place that is hardly ever open, has no menu or prices, and when it is open has one scary looking man behind the counter and motorbikes going inside and leaving with a package.
Or the takeaway that has never been open in three years. Or the shop with very limited opening hours that has hardly anything to sell - just some pop and chocolate bars.
I am not someone who knows anything about money laundering but I can spot these dodgy premises a mile away. So why does no one do anything about thus?

Someone downthread said Crimestoppers? It's not like the 80's where we are given advertisements on what to do if we see a bag on the platform - if they had any interest we would all know what to do and have faith something would actually be done.

Have you been living here under the Tories? We are told anyone coming in is a cockroach and should be shipped to Rwanda.

@RespiceFinemKarma Ah the Evil Tories argument. If they are anti-immigration they certainly hide it well.

When I was a student we loved round the back of a restaurant that was an obvious money laundering front. It was closed during the day and there would always be multiple blacked out Mercedes parked outside. It was unbelievably cheap and in the evening the owner Sergio used to sing and play on a Casio. He always started with “knights in white satin”. I liked to think it helped him unwind after a long day of nailing people to the floor.

Fuck sake just get on with ur own life and business. What difference is it making in ur life really.

Sorry, are you condoning slavery?
Have you any idea of the conditions these people have to endure?

I reported a car wash place, few years back, to the modern slavery number. I don't know exactly what happened as a result but it disappeared about six months later. It had been there for years as well. It's always worth reporting. Just because something is obvious to you it doesn't mean that the authorities know about it.

I bet those trafficked people work far harder than you or I!

I'm glad you brought this up OP, my DH and I often have the same conversation. If we all know that the Vietnamese nail bars and the Albanian car washes that only take cash are money laundering fronts then surely the authorities know. Not to mention that the staff are probably trafficked and not even on minumum wage? I remember reading recently that many of the 'Turkish' Barbers were money laundering fronts as well. I've often said to DH 'How is that even quite small towns seem to have four or five Turkish barber shops in them these days? How can they possibly all stay in business?'

Now I know how. I'm only surprised that I didn't spot it before.

There just seems to be an enormous amount of apathy around things like this. For a start, it should be illegal to say 'cash only.' If a Roma gypsy Big Issue seller or an ice cream van can take contactless payment then I am damn sure a really busy nail bar or car wash can. I don't necessarily agree with banning cash altogether, but businesses with bricks and mortar premises should be forced to offer the choice. That would smash a big part of their dodgy business model.

It's funny someone mentioned 'fake Italian restaurants run by Albanians.' Where I live there is an Italian restaurant just outside the town centre and they use the car park as cheap all day parking for people going into town. Clearly they don't open the restaurant at lunchtime, which always struck me as strange. I parked there once and the man who came out of the restaurant to take my money definitely struck me as NOT Italian, more like Albanian. I'd be interested to know if the restaurant actually operates at all.

Yanbu al all. We have about 15 “Turkish” barbers within a couple of miles of my house. No Turks, no customers.

Òur local Chinese takeaway was awful., nearly aways empty, microwaved food etc. It was an old detached house with three floors, bottom floor was the chippy,. He drove around in a brand new Mercedes and the drain outside reeked of cannabis.

Nail bars round here are all cash or bank transfer. They seem clean, tidy with happy chatty staff.

😂

There's a significant lack of resources and specialist knowledge to actually formulate cases that will get outcomes. Financial investigations are long and complex. It's far more beneficial to focus on the 3 or 4 bigger gangs who control 20 of these places, but those cases take years to gather enough evidence. They often have overseas links which complicate things further. By the time investigations actually get anywhere, the places have gone.

Definitely report any concerns through Crimestoppers or Action Fraud with as much detail as possible eg. Person/car descriptions.

Police don't have time to observe every dodgy shop in the high street in every town.

This shouldn't be down to the police though. There should be undercover task forces from HMRC and border force staff keeping these places under surveillance.

Our local Vietnamese nail bar has paper stuck to the windows to stop people seeing in from outside. There is a big sign inside saying NO PHOTOGRAPHY. There is a tiny sign inside saying 'cash only, no cards' and another sign saying 'you must leave your phone here with us if you need to go to the cash machine.'

Seriously? Fuck off. You are deliberately making it difficult for people to see that you only take cash before they sit down for their treatment because you don't want to deter people from using you. So the least you can do, having deliberately inconvenienced your customer for your own nefarious ends is to take the chance that the very occasional person might do a runner.

It's clearly dodgy AF.

Well, quite.

Irruption councils allow them to trade and corrupt police turn a blind eye.

@HeadDeskHeadDesk tbh I'm not entirely sure that the Big Issue sellers are legit. None of them work in the towns where they live, they all keep their patches for years and they're all Roma. We had one here a few years ago who reckoned he got his stuff robbed, there was a massive gofundme campaign to help him out, raised thousands, apparently no CCTV of the robbing despite it happening in broad daylight on the way into a department store, turned out he'd told the same story in a different town five years previous to that, again got thousands from people there, he can't even keep his story straight about how many kids he's got but wherever he is they're all under 10 years old and have been for at least 15 years ... now obviously he's a chancer, and what else is he up to?

Oh I don't need any convincing that they are not legit. I have refused to buy the BI for years now. It no longer serves the noble purpose it was intended for.

But my point is that people can manage to take contactless card when it suits them. So if you say to a BI seller 'sorry I haven't got any cash' they can say 'don't worry, I take contactless card payment.'

Amazing, isn't it, that they can afford the banking fees that car washes, nail bars and barbers all employing several people each will tell you they can't justify because it's too expensive.

The Big Issue have had a lot of trouble with sellers threatening other sellers over their patches. Your typical Big Issue seller is very different these days from the ex-forces homeless chap of the 1990s.

I don’t know what the Big Issue themselves think about the way their model has been adopted as a long-term method of making cash rather than the temporary leg-up back into better living conditions that it was meant to be.

@HeadDeskHeadDesk Well for all the small boats racism we've had over the last decade from the Tories, they're clearly doing sod all about this, aren't they?

Sorry if I'm being a bit thick but what's the reason theae places only take cash? How's that linked to money laundering, what do they do - pretend.theyve earned more money than they have done? So they get money fro. Drugs and pretend that money has come from their business?

Yeah exactly that. So they say they've sold 100 pizzas at £12.50 a pop and funnel £1250 drug/gun/etc money through the books. The money looks clean because now it's come from pizza sales, not cocaine. I mean there's a bit more to it, but that's the gist.

The police are probably still too busy working through the Encrochat stuff.