I found a money laundering deli
It’s amazing, they love having customers as it improves their cover so everything is dirt cheap and really high quality.
Sometimes people come in and the guy behind the register politely shuffles us out with an armful of free cold cuts and a wink
None of you will ever hear about this place from my lips
You think anyone does crime to support their dream of being a shop keeper with good deals?
We need to cook JackbyDev
Hope you meant
We need to cook, JackbyDev
I’d do it, but I think I’d be worse at being a criminal.
Start with small crimes like violating hygiene regulations!
Mattress Firm
In 1991 two small businesses were busted for being fronts for illegal gambling parlors. 30 Cleveland cops were part of the bust. I lived next to both of them at one time. One was a t-shirt printing shop, I forget what the other was. A year later I moved into a neighborhood that had a pizza shop with a very nice sign, no windows and never seemed to be open. It was not uncommon to see a patrol car parked in front
Uber
My town had an extremely generically named “spa” that I passed by all the time and joked that it must be a drug ring and I found out that no actually they were a human trafficking ring and they got shut down by the police.
Sad ending.
In my country, it’s the casinos. They naturally receive cash predominantly, and can easily launder millions. Everything else is small potatoes.
“La casa de las carcasas”. All Spaniards know it.
They expanded, they also have shops in Italy now. In big shopping malls, where the rents are insane.
There’s no way they can afford the rents just by selling stupid phone covers.
There is a rug store here that has been “going out of business” for decades. Since before they moved to their current location in a massive new building.
We have a local chain of antique shops, very high-end
Never see anyone come or go
We’re lousy with antique shops here, but there is this one that is only open two days a week, for a few hours. They just sell thrift store quality junk and discounted (new) disposable kitchenware. They start cleaning 30 minutes before “closing time” and don’t let you in the store.
There is a possibility that all of their real business is online and they just keep the storefront open with the crap stuff so they can claim to be a brick and mortar store.
Unless they’re a distributor or operating under a different name online I can’t seem to find anything
Their 3 separate ornate stores in a town with a population less than 20k do not direct anyone online
There’s a psychic/tarot reader on the highway near me that’s been around as long as I can remember, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a car parked out front.
It’s pretty clever if it is a money laundering front actually because a “business” like that doesn’t really do anything that generates much paperwork and can claim it charged imaginary customers any amount it wants without having to justify it.
No no that’s a failed cult. Quite different.
A failed cult would actually fail at some point, as in run out of money and lose the property.
These guys? Nope. I’m not sure a nuclear holocaust would uproot them at this point.
Used to ship auto parts from a company called ‘Specialty Products Company’.
“what’d you guys sell”
“IDK… ‘Products?’…”
Still not convinced they aren’t a money launderer.
There’s all sorts of brands like that on RockAuto for auto parts. FAMOUS BRAND is one. They sell $7 brake pad sets, maybe it’s a brand that shouldn’t be famous.
I suppose there could be business in procurement of “specialty products”. These guys do all the shopping around or find someone to make that one odd part you need or figure where to get 50,000 packages of foobar and how to ship/store it while you continue on with your life.
businesses that only accept cash are a telltale sign of laundering.
Not necessarily. They could just be declaring 1/2 transactions or something. Which would just be a form of tax evasion I think ?
we have what seems like about 15 mattress stores along one stretch of road, and we also have a store that sells nothing but bar stools. I’ve often thought that about those places…
There was a podcast episode about this. I want to say freakonomics or similar.
Iirc, the margins on mattresses are crazy. People will comparison shop, not realizing that many of the stores are subsidiaries of the same company. Stores often don’t have the exact mattress (different models at different stores making pricing matching impossible) so you’re down to making gut decisions.
The margins might be high, but I can’t imagine there is enough business to justify that many stores. How often do people actually go buy new mattresses?
Once or twice a day
The auction centre every time they sell art (or whatever some of that stuff is supposed to be).
The “Water and Donut Store” where they get mad if you ask for donuts, say it’s not the right time of day for donuts (all times of day/night are the wrong time, but there are always three or four stale, lonely donuts in the large glass donut cases) and have a station where you may, for a small fee, fill your water jugs with minimally filtered tap water. 🤨
say it’s not the right time of day for donuts
This feels like it’s taken right out of a video game.
