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?

https://sarsreporting.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/ you can report money laundering suspicions as an individual now instead of just an organisation.

https://www.modernslavery.gov.uk/start

Interesting as the shop fronts from these places tend to look really good.

@solongandthanksforallthedish it is not cheaper for a tiny business run by the owner to take cards rather than cash. It is cheaper to take cards if you pay staff to count cash and take it to the bank. I ran a small business before covid and cash was cheaper as I or my DH added it up and put in the books while we watched TV in the evening. And we spent the cash rather than banking it. Cards I paid a percentage on.

There is the little matter of legislation. To take action, you need evidence. And plausible evidence at that which the DPP and the courts will take seriously.

The tax authorities were actually pretty good until Gordon Brown amalgamated them under one organisation, HMRC, closed down most of the local offices and made huge numbers of experienced tax inspectors redundant! Clever that!!

Go back to the 70s and 80s and you had local tax inspectors, separate depts for VAT, payroll, income/corporation tax, etc., who'd do random/routine inspection of business records. Now with centralisation and amalgamation, all that's gone.

OP how do you know that the place isn't under investigation already?

Counting cash and putting entries in books, takes time. For any serious business time costs money. Even if you are watching TV at the same time.

Most businesses that take cash have a surplus and can’t just spend it.

Plus, with the competition on the market now, card transactions are much cheaper. Even my niece’s under 12s girls’ football club (run by volunteers) subs are card only.

Tax enquiries/investigations used to do "business economic exercises" to create what the "books" should look like given the purchases, margins, etc. That was accepted in courts/tribunals as "evidence" for prosecutions in the most serious cases and to justify tax demands.

There were instances where a tax inspector would sit in a pub and observe/record coins being put into juke boxes, pool tables, etc., which was then checked against book-keeping at a later date. Likewise they would use purchases of, say, cartons in a fast food place, to demonstrate that they must have "sold" x number of meals because they bought x number of containers, then used an average price per meal, to arrive at a theoretical sales total which they'd check against recorded sales.

Even one inspector compared undertakers records of where the deceased had been living immediately prior to death and checked them against the declared income records of old folk's homes to find homes that weren't declaring income from all their guests.

Plenty of ways of obtaining evidence of an adequate standard for the tribunals/courts. Trouble is, all that knowledge and experience was thrown away when Brown amalgamated the tax offices and made the experienced staff redundant.

@StarlightLady fine ignore my actual experience of running a small business.

wasnt Gordon Brown some 20 years ago? So plenty of time for those decisions to be reversed by whichever Govt has been in charge since then

I agree. Whatever Gordon Brown did it was a long time ago.
It just feels like no one with any power gives a fuck about the country any more.

I wish the council would do proper checks on businesses they took rates from. Although rates in our council are so sky high that no legitimate business can afford them in our town. The only shops in our town are charity shops (15 at last count), 3 bookies, bnm, poundstretcher, home bargains, a bakery, a butcher, 4 legitimate hairdressers. Then we have 4 vape shops that also randomly sell squishmallows and pokemon stuff. 2 sweet shops (with very odd hours and no customers and don't seem to have many sweets in stock). 2 dessert places (who seem to only open on rotation for 3 hours between 8pm and 1am) you need to follow them on fb for the opening hours its free delivery on all deserts within a 15 mile radius and desserts are £4.99 each. 6 Turkish barber shops, each employs 4 barbers but 3 seem to always be on a break even if there are multiple customers, staff breaks seem to be hours long (cash only, can only do 1 haircut). 4 junk shops (sells household items like brushes, bins, pans, and most of the same as what you can buy in home bargains et al, but instead everything is 50p or £20 no in between). A nail bar which "employs" 20 Vietnamese ladies and does gel and acrylic nails for £7.99, cash only walk ins, has privacy film across the windows and a paper sign in felt tip saying cash only, according to the local fb page there is a strange vibe in there and it's not very relaxing.

They are all obvious money laundering fronts, they are renting from the council..surely someone does some kind of checks...

@Caffeineislife what do proper checks look like? And who would do them?

Council departments have very limited powers and they certainly can't inspect outside of those. You don't need a licence to run a small business for example. Councils have nothing to do with taxation outside of business rates. They don't look after employment rights, human trafficking, minimum wage, immigration, right to work, safety in the workplace (well, in some places they do but it's a set list of business types like offices).

They do look after food hygiene and trading standards and will work in tandem with immigration / gang masters authority, HSE and so on for various pieces of work but not at every visit.

The problem is that everyone thinks it's someone else's responsibility and no one reports their concerns.The more reports, the more things can be looked at!

Maybe then there needs to be a public information campaign about where to report concerns too. Is it immigration? Or Trading Standards? Or HMRC? Or some other task force? No one seems to know. It's a massive problem almost country wide. With the government as cash strapped as it is, surely all this laundered money would be good tax revenue.

one of the many barbers (they come the country you go for nice gnashers) have now opened an ice cream parlour. And both are cash only. And the vape shoos and American candy…. Destroying our town.

So ask yourself the question, why have you taken no action in the small way you can, which is to report these premises, then extrapolate to everyone else.

So what can we do? Inform the council of a shop that is almost certainly a money laundering front? Like they are not already aware of its existence? The point is that the police, the tax men, the council, the immigration people, they all know. And they don't appear to care.

It's not that they don't care, it's partly a lack of resources and partly a lack of intelligence/evidence. Police can't just decide to start an investigation because a shop looks sketchy, they need to act on behalf of reporting.

So police are now supposed to randomly scour through people's accounts? Actually some councils and landlords have periods of lower rent and business rates when businesses initially set up. Trading and making a loss isn't an actual crime. Trading at a loss as a limited company can have insolvency ramifications but merely making a loss as a business isn't a crime. Unless there is actual evidence of money laundering what do you expect police to do? They aren't going to audit people

HMRC have the power to audit people and that’s exactly what they used to do.

A lot of criminal activity needs customers for these gangs to thrive.
Thats why they can exist in the first place and people that smoke weed, do cocaine or do something as seemingly inoffensive as use cash car washes or nail bars, they just perpetuate it all.

Who are those people? Maybe some unremarkable middle aged woman who has just commented on this thread. Just regular folk.

Many years ago I remember talking to a woman during the BSE crisis when cattle were being burned in fields in huge pyres. It was an awful site to see. She said she didn’t care how food was farmed as long as it was cheap, vast swathes of the population think like this. In my home town there are two cash nail bars and then some hairdressers and beauticians offer nails as well. I don’t get my nails done but the cash ones are cheaper. That woman would use them without a second thought.

I don't mean police, I mean other governmental bodies. They can do spot checks on the immigration status of the staff, surely? They should be given the power to ask to see evidence of the payroll, as a perfectly routine thing. Much like food hygiene and health and safety expectors do routine, periodic visits.

A lot of criminal activity needs customers for these gangs to thrive.
Thats why they can exist in the first place and people that smoke weed, do cocaine or do something as seemingly inoffensive as use cash car washes or nail bars, they just perpetuate it all.

Who are those people? Maybe some unremarkable middle aged woman who has just commented on this thread. Just regular folk.

You are right. I do use a hand car wash, and DH and I always joke about needing to visit the Albanian Money Launderers. Mainly because I like to get the car properly washed and valeted every couple of months without having to make an advance booking and without having someone come to my house to do it. I don't want to do it myself, would happily pay a bit more for a non-money launderer to do it, but there doesn't seem to be any drive-in, spur of the moment hand car washes that are not run and staffed by what I suspect are money laundering gangs. If I could find a less dodgy alternative I'd happily pay a bit more for it. They are very popular services so I see no reason why they couldn't make a decent profit by doing everything legally. It's a minimum wage job with low overheads and a fast turnaround. Premises / sites are generally in locations that are reasonably cheap to buy or lease. Like a plot in a B&Q car park for instance.

What I want is for these businesses to be FORCED in law to take card payments to give customers the choice. If someone chooses to pay cash then so be it. There is a place for cash payments too. But to allow businesses that employ numerous people and are clearly busy all day every day to say they 'can't afford the fees' for card payments is ridiculous. If they were forced to take cards then worst case is they'd close down because their scam has been thwarted, best case is they'd stay open but be forced to be more transparent. Even if they managed to launder some cash, it wouldn't be nearly as much.

I just don't understand why there is such a lack of appetite by seemingly every agency from the police to immigration to HRMC to just shrug and let it carry on in plain sight.

Yes!

That's why there are money laundering/people trafficking reporting websites/helplines set up. The govt relies on this intelligence from people who see the comings and goings.

I rang one myself after a really odd experience at a nail bar that I had always thought was ok (new influx of staff who spoke no English, had no idea how to do nails to the point it was dangerous and a bullying manager figure). The place is closed down. I don't know if connected.

The police and authorities can try to monitor their areas but do not have the resourcing to surveil every premises staffed by what, non British citizen in a certain trade (talking more about trafficking)? Where does that cross ethical lines?

Crimes often get stopped because they are reported. We are all part of keeping the community safe, not just those whose job it is.

If you have intel or evidence and are sitting on it, the question is why?