An organised crime wave has taken control of Britain’s high streets with thousands of stores involved in money laundering, illegal working and counterfeit sales. The National Crime Agency has launched a major investigation after raiding 2,700 shops in October. But officials fear landlords are increasingly willing to rent out properties to criminals, as they struggle to fill vacant properties.
The growing problem was revealed by Sal Melki, Deputy Director for Economic Crime at the National Crime Agency. He said: “What we are seeing is thousands of shops engaged in so called lower-level criminality. This is most visible in terms of the sale of small scale illicit vapes, illicit tobacco. We are also seeing illegal working and illegal renting – so, for example renting mattresses in the back of shops. And also small-scale money laundering.”
Mr Melki, a former Scotland Yard detective, said individual shops may launder relatively small amounts of criminal cash but the total impact was massive, with some of the cash going to crime gangs in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“A lot of these shops will be doing in the low thousands of pounds in a month. The aggregated effect of thousands of shops is what is quite pernicious and quite challenging.
“Because there are thousands up and down the country, the aggregated affect is huge.”
Shop owners may not understand the harm they were doing, he said.
“What we are not seeing at the bottom of the pyramid is the shopkeeper feeling they are part of an a broader organised crime eco-system. But of course, if you are selling illicit vapes or illicit tobacco, it’s part of a broader criminal supply chain to get those goods into the country.”
And there are also “hundreds” of shops nationwide involved in organised crime on a larger scale, he said.
“At the top of the pyramid, we are seeing hundreds of shops where the level of crime is organised. That might be selling thousands of fraudulent goods, it may be distributing drugs, it may be laundering millions of pounds.”
The National Crime Agency is working on an inquiry to evaluate the scale of crime in the retail sector, he said.
The so-called “illicit high street” has become the top concern of trading standards professionals across the country, according to Wendy Martin, Director of National Trading Standards, a Government-funded body.
Officials were dealing with “criminal stores that sell all sorts of things” including unsafe products, she said.
“It’s become significantly more of a worry in the last five years.”
The House of Commons Business and Trade Committee has launched an inquiry into the problem, and has written to Home Office police minister Sarah Jones. Committee chair Liam Byrne, a former Treasury Minister, said: “We have heard the most appalling evidence from around the country, and we can see it in our own constituencies.
“What it looks like to us is that there is an organised crime wave that is taking hold of the British high street.”
