What is the issue with 'vape shops'?

[SnufkinsSpiritAnimal]

I see it mentioned in threads about declining towns, and whilst I understand that chicken shops, betting shops and such tend to pop up more regularly in downmarket areas, why is a vape shop a signifier of this?

Surely people from all areas and backgrounds might wish to give up smoking cigarettes and use vaping as a way to bridge the gap? Why would it be associated with a 'bad area'?

I must say that currently I live in a town that has sped downhill faster than a bat out of hell, especially since the pandemic, and there's no improvement in sight (rising crime, knives, dereliction and drugs).
But we only have one vape shop, to my knowledge here.

I agree with the latter but not the former. Businesses publicise their opening hours which a fraud investigator could easily check and if they had a narrow window but were putting through scores of sales then it wouldnt add up.

Yes we had a weird hairdressers it was fitted out really well.They were hardly ever open, even though their shop hours were open 5 days a week. I once got my DC haircut there and they had absolutely no clue how to cut hair just cut a straight line at the bottom of their long hair no sectioning.

My local town is a disgrace. Vape shops, phone repair, penny slot arcades, nail bars, convenience stores with sofas and men asleep on them and cheap pubs. The centre is full of men with obvious alcohol/drug dependency issues and the resulting social problems. The town centre might as well shut down tbh.

@Rummly OK, so you have a chicken shop. You buy loads of cheap shit chicken from someone who is just as dodgy as you, probably adjusts the invoices or whatever. You declare in your books that you’ve bought £500 worth of chicken, which you will obviously sell at a profit. HMRC see that from your £500 you’ve made £1000 in a week. OK that’s fine. But what if your chicken shop is only open at lunch times at weekends. How can you have made that much money? So you have to stay open longer, to add credibility to your sales figures.
Of course in reality you probably didn’t buy that much chicken, and you’ve not sold much either. The £1000 is from the cocaine your friend has sold.

I work in counter fraud (albeit very recently but it's eye-opening). It's not for people selling ket on street corners, its for the people higher up the chain to take their money to. You are on council records as having a business, properly registered and everything, that's why all this money is in your bank, not because you are high up in a drug ring. Criminals at this level know what theyare doing.

Buying houses at action used to also be a way of making money clean, but I think the regulations and checks are tighter now.

It’s funny how vape shops are tacky and nasty, whereas old-school tobacconists, however awful their products, were often really lovely shops. All polished wood and brass and glass jars. And of course unburnt tobacco actually smells quite nice.

@Miyagi99 no xenophobia, just facts. There are plenty of nasty British criminals too, but these particular money laundering businesses tend to be run by other nationalities.

Yes.

There have always been dodgy businesses and always will be. Whether it’s fly-by-night rates dodgers, receivers of stolen goods, illegal import sellers, money launderers or whatever. In years gone by it was scrap metal and car dealers that were regarded suspiciously.

The stupidities in this are (1) that money laundering and drug running is done by shops whose products people disapprove of (rather than by, say, grocers or hairdressers) and (2) that foreign people do it.

I’m really not convinced that many on here actually know what money laundering - as opposed to fraud - actually is.

I also think that small retailers are more likely to open up because of new trends - like vapes and mobiles - and don’t stay in the business long. For the most part I doubt it’s any more sinister than that.

It used to be sun bed shops here. A business taking lots of small, regular cash payments can be very useful for certain types of people.

This. ^ I cringe when I see someone sucking on a vape. They look ridiculous! 😆

I mean, yeah - needs must and all that, if someone wants to give up smoking, but anyone who starts vaping (after never being a smoker) is an idiot. Why start vaping unless you are trying to stop smoking FFS? Do you know how silly you look? AND we don't know the long-term effects of vaping yet. God knows what health horrors lie ahead.

Re the OP's question. Yes, vape shops are often a front for something more sinister. Often money laundering or drug dealing. Always the same kind of people running them too.

It's not about addictions .

Its about the quantity of these shops there are - and that you barely see one customer in there . Same as the desert shops and some nail bars.

All cash trades with few customers .

@Rummly it’s not that “disapproved of” shops decide to launder money. No one had anything against nail bars, vape shops etc when they first started appearing. But once it became known they were laundering money, those shops started to attract disapproval. The crime came before the disapproval.

And regarding the nationalities of the people involved - I suspect the criminals at the top of the food chain are all sorts of nationalities - plenty of Brits. But it’s probably easier to get vulnerable desperate immigrants to do your dirty work, hence nail bars being full of Vietnamese workers, for example.

I think we all know what money laundering is and several PP have explained how this would work in a chicken shop. Banking money received from say drugs but declaring it as turnover from chicken sales.

Years ago, l did some training about children.

In my city 2 postcodes had no mothers smoking at birth. These were both well off areas. There are no vape shops in these areas. Loads in areas where high number of mothers smoking at birth.

@D12troop some people don’t seem to know, and were baffled at why drug dealers would want to buy so much fried chicken

@Rummly why don’t you want this to be true? It’s been widely reported in the press. Also I think most of the posters on here are describing money laundering accurately.

I suppose it's hungry work!

@D12troop 😂

Why chicken shops? Why not fry-up cafes or bijou French bistros?

And, even if this implausible method of laundering money were true, the drugs gangs make millions of pounds. Do you really think a high street chicken shop is not going to arouse the suspicions of a bank’s compliance staff with deposits of hundreds of thousands of pounds? That’s a lot of chicken burgers with extra mayo.

Why can’t we just assume they’re people selling fried chicken for a living?

I’m happy to look at press reports. Although to be of any use they’d have to be reports of widespread chicken and vape shop wrongdoing, not some local report of a crook. The only press coverage of organised retail criminality I’ve seen has been about sweet and souvenir shops in the west end of London. And those were tax and rates dodgers, not money launderers.

@Rummly I think chicken shops are just one example but a lot of other types of food shops are used too. Basically you want food that's cheap (so people pay cash) and quick (so you don't have to pay many staff there or buy lots of assets) and where it's very difficult to know how many customers there are. It's much harder to do with a proper restaurant but chicken shops, takeaways, bars etc are all used. Scrap metal is very popular at the minute too apparently. Nail bars and car washes are a bit out of fashion.

@Rummly I can only assume you are on the wind up. Its always bottom market products/services bought generally by the lower classes for CASH. I think cash is the separator here. Whether that be a £20 vape, a £10 car wash, a £15 haircut or a £30 nail job these places can say they accept cash only which is perfectly legal and as long as most of their customers are happy to pay cash its no issue.
A bijou bistro wouldnt survive long if it only took cash. Ditto most shops TBH, but theres something about 1 trick shops that somehow makes paying cash only the norm.

As for the amounts vis a vis drugs, I guess it depends how much the owner is selling. Not all dealers are huge. And a barbers with 4 chairs could easily be turning over 3 grand a day "on paper".

@Rummly that’s why you need a lot of them. To launder a lot of money.
I can’t tell if you’re genuinely very naive, or being deliberately obtuse!

The 2013 vapes were a different kettle of fish altogether, I'm afraid. I also gave up smoking around that time using vapes. Now they're a new addiction marketed at increasingly younger kids. They're also a real minefield since we don't really know the risks.

How does taking cash-only assist with money laundering? Obviously cash is tax ‘efficient’ if you don’t disclose it - which is fraud or ‘cheating the revenue’ - but the whole point seems to be that these businesses are banking money. You’re telling me they’re washing it - the whole point of which is that it can be (falsely) accounted for. So HMRC or the police wouldn’t have any difficulty tracking it down whether it’s electronic or cash payment. And cash payment is no help against bogus invoices for purchases.

AFAIK, much the biggest reservoir of laundered money remains real property. But I don’t see anyone on this thread disapproving of estate agents.

That is fantastic logic! There are a lot of chicken shops because they need to split up drug proceeds. Not because a lot of people like fried chicken?

🙄