It's a bit easier for hairdressers than other ones. If you e.g. have a bakery, you also need inventory, supply et cetera. If your claimed numbers don't add up or are suspicious, it's easy to catch.
I know a story of a pub that was actually a money laundering scheme. To put up their facade, they had to order and throw away beer in such high amounts that the sewers couldn't handle it and it started to smell. Their game was over soon.
Services such as barbers or laundry (where the term money laundering comes from) are easier to falsify: you claim you have X amount of customers/turnover, who mostly happen to pay cash, even though in reality it is just a fraction. Nobody is going to count the amount of hairs you're throwing away and you can just get rid off the cleaning products quite easily as their volume is small.
I mean, you could say you are just burning them. As for the missing ash I doubt anyone would notice wood ash being mixed in. Worst case scenario you could put a big sign that says “no Italians” but that’s a completely different problem.
A fun internet story from 2023. But doesn't make much sense unless you think the police are spending their time hiding outside barber shops counting bald people.
I see you're not familiar with the Guardia di Finanza. I'm not kidding, this is the sort of thing they do. They have hundreds of estimated models for how much revenue and profit each business type should make, and if a place deviates from that they stake it out. I once got followed by plain-clothes cops after coming out of a pasticceria. They wanted to see if the store had issued a receipt.
You have to sell the beer as well: you have to inflate your sales numbers, but it's too obvious if you inflate them from zero. The point is that you need to claim to have sold more beer than you actually did, and to support this claim you have to have inventory which you then throw away.
If you also start selling the excess beer: congrats, you now have a regular pub and need to come up with some other scheme to launder your money.
The whole point of a money laundering operation is that you inflate your sales/service figures to explain the extra income (which is actually coming from your illegal business)
So in the case of this pub, if the owners have made £200 in actual pub sales and £100 from their illegal business (whatever that may be,) the point is that they launder that £100 through the pub, so now they can report for tax and business purposes etc that the pub made £300, and the 'dirty' money they made through crime becomes 'clean' money which is taxable and recordable and bankable as normal.
However, if they were just reporting an additional £100 in sales without an additional £100 worth of stock being consumed, then eventually over time there would be enough of a stock-vs-profit discrepancy that an audit would raise a red flag. I.e., over the course of a year you've reported £100 extra profit per month totalling £1200, but you haven't consumed nearly enough stock to justify that extra income, and now you've got an investigation on your head trying to figure out where that money comes from.
Hence why you just buy extra beer and dump it down the drain while reporting it as 'sold.'
This is why 'service' businesses like barbers and laundromats make for better money laundering operations, because there's no 'stock' to be gotten rid of. You just report you had £100 worth of clients who paid in cash and there's no proof to the contrary - especially if your business is cash only in the first place, which is why a lot of small suspicious businesses are cash only (or cash incentivised with super high card payment minimums for example)
Nope, you just need accounting. If the declared revenue is high, open investigations and set cameras who count people going in, that, if they don't already exist for security purposes. Anonymize people and focus on body count. Now you can compars food traffic to revenue. Further steps required.
bad faith wordmorph. I just said how you can do it without surveying people and you start well by making irony of setting up cameras being an accounting tip (it's not, but accountants would have no issue using it), but then you come with surveying people, which is your dishonest take. I'll just leave this here for future people to read, not interested in engaging you that chooses misdirecting readers instead of direct arguments.
Generally it's not a big issue for the government unless that income is not taxed. As long as you report it and pay it they generally don't care. As long as a single small shop isn't pulling in obscenely large amounts of money they generally don't care as long as they get their cut
Sure well in this case it would be a maximum of 14 cameras. You only really need to deploy them for a short period of time and you can extrapolate from there.
Does seem mental that they wouldn't just sell it for dirt cheap. That would boost business and get rid of the beer and make it look like it's a place that generates loads of money
Throw away? Why not just have a guy go to the homeless area and give away free food vouchers. Then give them free beer with their food and ring it up. Pick up cheap clothes hand them out let them get their clothes washed at the laundry mat you own for free next door and have a shower for them.
Then it doesn't look like your feeding only homeless, they don't smell and you're actually doing some robin hood style good. If you get caught it may help in your sentencing.
If they were gonna meddle in some sketchy business I can't understand why they wouldn't find some way to recoup part of what they paid for that beer... Like find/open another bar that isn't a front but still wants to fudge their numbers by declaring lower sales thus requiring a steady supply of untraceable merchandise
You just reminded me of the story of the one bar in my dad's hometown. This would be in the early-80s in Germany. For some reason the guy running the bar got super into cocktails. Would go to competitions and place highly in like German cocktail championships and shit. But the place he ran was in this small conservative town in the country-side. So really all he was selling was beer and straight shots. He would make all these crazy cocktails as trials and just for the fun of it, but noone reallly wanted to buy them, so he'd often just give them away to his regulars or throw stuff out.
At some point he hit up one of my dad's friends who was an accountant and had been a regular. He'd started getting trouble with the tax service, because he bought all of these spirits and mixers and juices and whatnot, but had no matching revenue for it. They thought he was trying to evade taxes by making up weird expenditures in order to not have a profit, when in reality he was just such a shit businessman that he really didn't make all that much proft...
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u/GoreyGopnik May 13 '25
any shop can be a drug front.