They sell “gift baskets” and the website still says “order now to get your basket in time for the 2021 holiday season”.
I used to live round the corner from a strange little place that sold cassette tapes (what we used for music and sometimes even data before CDs, for those too young to know). Everyone was convinced it was a front but it turned out it was a world famous tape supplier. Just happened to be based in my quiet little back street.
The newsagents next door to my last place have to have been a front though. Shelves were half bare, only ever stocked with stuff that doesn't go off. Always two or three guys hanging out in the back room, looking slightly surprised if you wanted to buy something. Cash only, no cards (not that unusual round here but they usually have a minimum purchase rather than just no card machine at all these days).
They were absolute sweethearts. Took loads of deliveries for us, always really nice about it. And that's more evidence that it's a front. Proper criminals are the best neighbours anyone could ask for because the last thing they want is complaints bringing the police to their door.
Oh yeah, I wandered in. I was with a group of people that didn't really know each other. We were supposed to see a niche movie at the movie theater. It was a one time showing special event. It was a group of people that my wife met online that is into this franchise. Anyway, the company that made the movie forgot to send the movie to the movie theater. Or rather, they sent it to the wrong movie theater. They were going to show the movie the next day instead, and gave us all refunds and free movie vouchers. But the group was already all there, so we decided to walk to a local coffee shop nearby. It wasn't a coffee shop. It was a casino. Casinos are not legal where I live. We walked in, awkwardly looked around and walked out and went to Starbucks.
Unrelated, but their toilet was on the patio outside. Very weird experience all around.
tl;dr I was wrong.
I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.
Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn't think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.
The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.
But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn't think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I'd go once a week and if I ever found a date I'd impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn't like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).
Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.
We decided there's no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.
Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn't recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren't a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(
A lot of car washes popping up near me with a monthly fee unlimited washes program that I'm positive is just a better version of what Walter did in Breaking Bad. Scan your app's QR code and away you go, meanwhile someone behind the scenes rings it up as a cash sale and throws $15 into the till.
An appliance store in my area. There are always crazy nice cars out front. Car brands I don't even recognize. The store is super crappy looking and run down. Went in one time when we were looking for fridges. Everything was so expensive. Very old models of fridges out on the floor. No customers. Very weird.
There are none that I know with 100% certainty, but there are a few types of businesses that are generally known to be fronts where I come from (and I suspect in many cities), and there are a few specific ones I'm confident are fronts.
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Massage parlors are commonly fronts for prostitution all over the world, or offer "extra" services. This is so common that many of them have prominent signs explicitly saying they do NOT.
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I swear, there must be more video stores than there are working VCRs in my city. And they seem to have kept mostly the same stock of VHS tapes for the past 30 years. They are rumored to be fronts for, again, prostitution.
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I have strong suspicions about psychic readers. There are a ton of them, and many are open at odd hours of the night in places that are not busy enough to get any legitimate foot traffic.
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Gyms are all fronts for...gyms. I mean, the gym business is corrupt enough that I feel like that counts.
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We have a fireworks shop. They just sell fireworks, and are open all year round. In the UK we have like 4 days a year when it's acceptable to set them off.
They even have a number in the window for you to ring outside of regular opening hours.
It might as well just be called Mike's Heroin and Weed Shop.
Rome, Italy. rent for a small store is 800/mo where this store is, and an average salary is about 1200/mo. This antique/junk store sells like 2 things a day(with average price being 5€) always takes unfavorable exchanges and generally isn't great business-wise, yet it's been here for 15 years, in a district where most - more reasonable - businesses fail within 2 years.
It doesn't take credits cards, only cash. There's a flight simulator controller from the 80s that didn't sell for a decade.
Maybe I'm just paranoid.
Edit: i still love that store, I'm addicted to collecting old junk (self promotion time: I founded a coin collecting community over at lemmy.ml,its called numismatics) and I go to that store every month or so, it helped me to get rid of some old vynil records from my grandfather in exchange for some cash (obv without receipt) but still, I think it either evades taxes (taking that from granted) or it's something bigger, like a front for a mafia or something else.
Nice try FBI.
Tiny takeaway with a rich owner, hires on the spot, cash in hand payments, no contracts and most regular deliveries are to houses that stink of weed. Pretty sure that one would be a front (but it’s a front that does good food)
There's a cafe near me that's open 24/7. I've been in there a couple of times and the coffee is horrible, the last time I visited the guy behind the counter didn't know how to turn on the espresso machine and had to call his boss.
But I'm 100% certain all those people turning up at 1am are just getting a caffeine hit before heading to the clubs
There was an asian food place in my local mall back when I worked there as a teen. My old boss casually mentioned that it was a human trafficking front. They'd have women from their native country marry for a visa, have them come to US, employ them work at the store, then.. I have no idea.. I sincerely hope it was for visas and not more nefarious purposes..
There was also a gambling ring going on in the tailor shop of the same mall. But that was whatever.
Nice try, detective
There was (maybe still is) a cake shop in Southgate, North London. About a minute from my old flat.
The cakes in the window display rarely changed, if ever.
The guy running it looked like if you imagine the toughest prisoner at a prison, only wearing an apron.
About 50/50 whether the glass would be smashed whenever you walked past.
It was often "open" and had people coming in and out of it at 2-3am when I came back from nights out.
And there was a drive-by shooting right in that area while I lived there, that I always assumed was related. 😅
There's this old bookstore that has always looked sketchy. It's in a district that's had a lot of development over the past like 20 years, but that place remains. I tried checking it out once when I was younger, at least 18 if not 21. There was one car in the lot when I got there and I started to walk inside. As I was approaching, a guy stepped out and said something to the effect of, "what are you looking for?" And I answered that I wanted to browse the books. He responded, "there's nothing for you here." So I said, "okay" and I left. Haven't been back since, haven't been around there in a bit but it's probably still there.
Permanently Deleted
There's a legitimate pizza place around me that's been around for ~50 years. My mom went to school with the owners children and when she was in high school their dad had a small stint in jail for tax evasion and unregistered and hot guns. Apparently he was importing a lot of guns from Italy and one day a shipment got caught. About 10 years ago, my mom became friends with someone who was hired to do their taxes. She didn't give any details, but she told us the numbers really didn't add up and she had to drop them as a client their first year due to ethical reasons.
The thing is the pizza is really good and kind of an institution in my town. I wouldn't say it is strictly a front, but money does move through it. The family also owns a lot of small strip malls in the tri county area and some historical properties as well.
Oh and one of the sons married one of their 2nd/3rd cousins from Italy in the 90s. The rumor was it was just to help her get citizenship but they are still married to this day and it's kinda weird.
I can't prove it, but there's a florist in my town, definitely still in business, that I have not seen a non-company-branded car in front of in actual years. Morning, noon, and night, never any customers. Never any movement from inside. The only time I ever saw the lights on was in the dead of night. The building is half-claimed by ivy.
If it weren't for the upkept greenhouse and the sign out front occasionally changing, you'd never know it wasn't totally abandoned, but it's still operating. Mob activity is the only way to explain it.
A place I thought was a front did actually turn out to be one. A Boba shop that made worse quality Boba than others in the same chain turned out to be a front for the trade of stolen car parts and electronics (laptops, phones, cameras, etc). They had $100k of stolen stuff hiding in the back of the store and were shipping it to China and Hong Kong for sale. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/S-F-boba-shop-was-a-front-for-an-international-17162814.php
Every mattress store
There's a "cash converters" style store in my town (like a pawn shop, but they don't do loans or deal in jewelry). Once, years ago I saw a game controller (Logitech wheel) that I was after in the window . I tried to buy it, and was told it was "reserved" It's still there, along with everything else. They don't seem to have any stock turnover at all, and they're still open.
After talking with coworkers, it's generally assumed to be a money laundering front.
I found a really niche state patrol office to pay a fix-it ticket. It was on the third story of an off site parking garage for a mall type thing. With only two "visitor" spaces. There were like 4 cops in this tiny office just yucking it up when I walked in. They all did the "oh look busy now!" dance when I surprised them. I think this was one of those "put him on desk duty so he'll still get a paycheck while he gets cleared" type places. Nice enough for cops, but they had that shitty kid just got away with something vibe, bigtime.
I live in Vegas.
Where do I even begin????
I live in Italy, pick one at random, that's it
I live in a very rural town surrounded by farms. Just outside the town is a business, but it's completely unmarked and the entire building is painted black. There's a chain link fence all around it, and there's a partition in the middle. Behind the partition you can randomly see just ridiculously nice sports cars, and it's always different ones.
Once we were driving by and saw this really nice lowered sports car randomly stuck in the ditch out front, and it took them at least half the day to get it out.
I'm certain it's a chop shop.
It’s not a front anymore because it doesn’t exist, but my massage therapist had a baby and was going to be out for a while. So I went looking around town for a hold over until she got back, and found a “spa” that was across from the entrance to the local Navy base that advertised “Pretty Asian massage therapists” and had a picture of a young lady in a bikini on the front page of their website. It didn’t help matters that all of the reviews were from men.
Now I’m not going to speculate on what was going on, as far as I know it could have been a regular spa that happened to have attractive women working there. I wouldn’t know, that’s not something I want to mess with.
When I lived in Daytona a shop opened up that sold nothing but Super-Whippers - $1 plastic whisks. They had two display trees in the front windows, one with black whisks and one with white whisks. They were never open and there was a hand-written sign on the door that said "Closed. If you want a Super-Whipper, they have some at the nail salon next door." The store was in a strip mall less than 200 ft. from three dollar stores and a Publix, all of which sold plastic whisks.
Pretty sure it was a front lol.
A handful of restaurants which definitely can't afford the amount of people working there and the interior. They always operate the same way: the food doesn't taste good, expensive interior and (many) more personnel than customers.
Unless they all have a philanthropist millionaire as a sponsor, I suspect they launder money. Apparently this is quite common in Germany because hard cash is still common here. Even large sums of money.
There are a ton of gambling places where you never see anyone walking in. It's a public secret these are money laundering operations from some well connected crime syndicate.
Theres a video rental place down the way from me in Vancouver, BC. First, Vancouver is expensive as hell. Our average 1 bdrm is roughly 3k a month. This guy has a prime location, in Vancouver, on a busy street, with a video rental store. Who rents movies these days? Maybe some, but surely not enough to keep him afloat. It's not an adult video store either.
Not sure if this counts since most of them have recently closed down, but for a while there was a large number of American candy stores popping up all over town. Many cash only, same products and same branding across many different stores. Hardly anyone was ever shopping there, and yet they could somehow always afford to pay rent for prime locations. Eventually, several journalists picked up on the topic and found evidence many of them were fronts for money laundering and were tied to organised crime. Not sure if it was directly connected to that increased awareness, but shortly after more of these articles were published, most of the local stores closed.
We had a restaurant on the corner that was open 20 hours a week. They closed a few years ago. I miss their fries.
Shady as shit no-tell motel, overpriced as hell for where it's located. Pulls in maybe 5 guests a week, but the owners flashing about in a shiny new car.
Where I live in Ireland, multiple towns near me have new nail salons setup for manicures, pedicures etc. Thing is though, almost all of them have big signs up saying "cash only". A lot of the time its not busy or they have no customers yet new ones open up every month. Its almost certainly a front. The cash only thing is likely so that its easier to avoid tax or launder money. The government was looking to make cash only businesses illegal and must be able to take card payments too, but that legislation is probably a few years out yet.
There's an arcade in the center of town beneath an expensive (yet shitty) apartment complex. The arcade windows are covered but there is a sign that says "Opening Soon". It's been two years and nothing has changed externally. At first I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, but the property is expensive to rent and after 2 year I have my doubts.
What I don't understand though is if you were using the place as a front, wouldn't an arcade be a great place to launder money while your at it?
In Barcelona there are a lot of many small cafes, bars, restaurants (located generally in zones where the terrain is very expensive) that got purchased by Chinese families.
Generally these were frequented for coffee, drink + tapas, lunch meal. But after the ownership change they end up frequented mainly for the same stuff but not for the food because it's generally not good.
To me these are front for something else. They always become much worse for eating. Never better. Like there is no intention of improving it. But they still do it smartly because they keep some customers just for the beer and coffee mainly after work.
Cellphone cases stores
So I was about to write about a very weird hat shop on the ground floor of an exclusive apartment building in the most hip neighbourhood in my city. They have like 15 hats on display, no customers ever, three bored workers scrolling through their phones all day. But I went to their website, which they do have and it seems most of their business is actually distributing Stetson products and other premium leather goods in this part of Europe, so I guess they can very well afford having one brick-and-mortar display store.
Have a furniture store in the small downtown area of my town. The entire building looks cigarette stained. They have brown tint on their windows, and peering inside, all the furniture looks crazy old and probably not something you'd want to buy.
On top of that, they're open "by appointment only" and that's just about the only sign they have other than the name of the business. Never seen anyone go in/out. It's in a major location too, "Main street", there's no way it's a real thing.
I have a shop near where I live in the middle of a suburb that only sells fans (the wind blowing kind) and they are a DHL pickup point, everytime I am there there is nobody there. The fans are stacked in boxes up to the ceiling and the quantity of them never changes, been that way for over a year now.
There is also always a shady ass person behind the counter, and often a few shady persons in the "back" of the store.
Since they only sell fans they should've called their store OnlyFans come to think about it .
There's a neighborhood restaurant near me that is unreasonably bad. You can't tell the staff apart from people who are just hanging around - and you do need to figure it out cause no one is coming to take your order. They're dirty, disinterested and rude. Food is typically some piece of meat and fries which is served swimming in sauce, and often it's way overdone or cold / raw. They're often missing ingredients. You just get the feeling overall that they're truly not interested in having customers.
There's a burger shop ona prominent corner with an odd name (I won't say to avoid doxxing my neighborhood but it's basically "Burger Style Burgers"). Despite where it's located, it's never busy and it's been there forever. There's one other location: 3000 miles away in LA. Definitely a money laundering operation.
I used to live in a town with no less than three scuba shops.
It was not on the water.
For decades there was a funeral parlor down the street from my house. Right in the middle of a busy residential neighborhood in the city. There's only on-street parking and they had two spots in front of their building reserved for funerals. Only no one ever parked there. No cars, limos, hearses, anything. A neon open sign turned on every day over their door but no one ever came or went.
My parents had a tenant who was an elderly gentleman with few relatives. When he died, my mom called the parlor to arrange the funeral but no one answered. She left a message on their machine but no one ever called back. We weren't fully surprised because we'd been calling it a front for years, but mom was unconvinced until then.
The building got fully renovated a few years ago and we actually saw a funeral taking place, so they've upped their game.
There's this building near my old place. It's old, it's somewhat tall, with a great big hall inside, looks like. LOTS of religious paraphernalia and icons about. It's a little creepy.
No one ever comes or goes during the week; only on weekends. And then it's a steady stream. I don't know how they can afford the space they're taking up, but they seem to. I worried it could be a front for gambling or child-trafficking, but they call themselves a church. Definitely seems sus. It's been on Reddit, actually, a few times.
Just kidding, it's the famous Knox Presbyterian with the sayings everyone sends everyone.
Mattress Firm
There are several! It's kind of a problem in my city but none of the civilians care because somehow they have the best food
There is a carpet store and restaurant near my house, and in the three years I've lived here I can't recall seeing anyone buy anything or even visit either store a single time.
Once my partner and I actually walked over to check it out and the carpet store was closed and all of the windows were covered. It was like 4 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, so I can't imagine why it would be closed.
There's supposedly a lot of Russian gang activity in my area, so I'm assuming it's just a front for them but I've never really confirmed it.
It's a public secret that "Winkel 137" (EN: "Shop 137") in Rotterdam is a front for illegal activity, most likely drugs. It's never open during normal hours, the shelves are barely stocked, and no one ever really enters the place. It's been there for as long as I can remember though.
If you look at the place in Google maps you can even see some weird ducts coming out of the wall on the above floor, presumably to clear out some of the vapors coming from the shop.
Here in Brazil, I guess the Subway franchise. Almost no one inside the shops for years and lack of real promotional campaigns give the sensation that it is a big money washing scheme.
In the city I grew up in, there’s a Chinese restaurant near my home that never gets packed, not even on busy weekends. I’ve also never seen more than 2 customers at a time eating there. And yet, it’s outlasted every single restaurant in the vicinity for 3 decades. That, and there’s always an expensive car or two parked in front.
I live fairly close to a place notoriously filled with drug dealing gangs. One summer 3 pet fish stores and 4 barber shops opened and within a couple of month they were all closed.
The old pizza place used to be owned by a big drug dealer and you could rig up, order a special topping o. The top and you could get weed over the counter.
Then my local chicken fast food restaurant did the same but you got to go through the drive Thu.
They had to close it down and deep clean because they were selling everything lol.
In the town I live in one of the worst kept secrets is a small hundred year old mixed use 2 or 3 story building. The Laundromat at the bottom with a handful of old washing machines and dryers is always locked and never actually open. Former tenants have publicly stated it's purely a front because the landlord doesn't want to bother with a commercial tenant but because of the zoning it needs a commercial space on the ground level so they maintain a fake laundromat
When I was in Seattle there is this pizza place in a suburban neighborhood that only open for 3 hours 4 days a week from 2:00 to 5:00. All of the workers were the same ones every day and they all three looked no nonsense but friendly enough when you ordered .
The pizza was really good and the calzones were fantastic, so I would go there often, but I almost never saw another customer in the place even though they had at least twenty tables with four chairs at each table set up in two giant dining rooms.
And they were in and out of the way spot with a very small sign. And I think at the most I ever saw one table taken up when I went there and that was only once.
And I never waited in line.
It just seemed like a really odd disposition for a pizza place that obviously needed to pay for a pretty high overhead considering how much space it took up.
This one time at oh fuck it just read this shit.
Hartford Police made a major drug bust at a business called Hot Mama's posing as a restaurant on Franklin Avenue shortly before 7 p.m.
Not my town, but there is a junk shop in main railway station, (sells clothing, shit like t-shirts with weed prints, pipes, random little trinkets). I can only assume rent is very expensive in such a central location, and I really can't think of any way how that place is profitable. I only visited once as a teen since they sold us weed pipes even though I was underage. -There is a actual tobacco shop nearby, with much better selection. -There is never any customers -None of the products sold are very valuable, so they would have to sell lot of them to make profit -If you really wanted to buy cringe t-shirt, there is many shops for that around as well, all of which are well known compared to this one
Many business have gone under during the years in that location, replaced with others, but somehow this one place has been there over 10 years.
Red Rooster. It's a national chain restaurant here in AU with outlets in every major city, you never see anyone in there and nobody knows anyone who eats there, but they never seem to have any trouble staying open.
Cell phone repair business nearby. It operates out of a small booth next to a supermarket, charges double what the competition in an actual store next door does for phone accessories and repairs, and a dodgy looking boss type guy visits often. I honestly think it's a front for stealing smartphone components or something similar
Long John Silvers, of course.
I mean I live in Berlin...
I once went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Lancaster PA. Time comes to pay and for some reason we needed to go to the back room to pay. I walked in there and it was like one of the movie scenes where someone walks into an old west saloon or something and the music stops. In real life the music kept playing but there was a group of really rough looking old Vietnamese guys huddled around a pool table all smoking cigs who stopped what they were doing and went silent to just stare us down. It honestly looked like that scene in it’s always sunny where frank is playing cards with a bunch of Vietnamese guys. There were dudes sitting at a little bar, some women cleaning some sort of food at a little table. I don’t know that it was a “front,” but I definitely felt like I had walked into like the Vietnamese mob headquarters or something. Honestly like a mafia movie or something, just replace Italians with Vietnamese.
Yes. It looks super dingy, and I've never seen anyone go in there.
But the main clincher is they had PS5's right up the height of their rarity. Super suspicious.
But it worked so I guess that's the main thing. I was half expecting him to ask if I wanted any drugs or a "new friend", but no.
There was a ton of self storage places popping up around town by some company that with green branding (I dont remember their name). They bought up all this property that would have been better suited for retail space (one near me was specifically blocked by locals for being an eyesore, unless they met some demands), built huge multi floor storage complexes, and then immediately sold it off. Most of em got bought by Public Storage and repainted orange.
Like what? That had to have been a front for some money laundering or some shit. Like they clearly had no intention of running those places after constructing them.
There’s a medical supply store in my town I went in one time because my mom needed a crutch and everything was covered in dust. I went online and a bunch of people were saying that it’s just a front to commit insurance fraud.
At one point in Toronto I counted 10, yes ten, perfume shops on Yonge St from bloor to Dundas. I swear one of the shelves in one of them would have to be a secret door.
It's been many years since I was there but there's a ski shop in Gainesville Florida.
We have a Mexican store here (one of several), but people come from ~90 miles to come to THIS one. None of the others in town, just this one. There’s a ton of others between here and there but this one is special. It’s not fake documents because I know other places that have those.
Not sure what they’re doing but they’re always busy and a ton of out of town/out of state people come and go.
There's a car repair shop that is basically just a private garage, no sign, no ads, but on the regular, you see brand new, expensive cars with license plates from far away being "fixed" there. Always only takes an hour tops.
There is also a known drug dealing hot spot on the car park across the road of the car shop.
There's this corner store in my town where you can also pick up packages. Everything about it seems half-assed, their opening hours are short and in the middle of the day and the store has some displays with overpriced expired candy although they couldn't be arsed to fill all the shelves with something. It's hard to know if they're open or not because they can't be bothered to put up signs on the sidewalk or something.
Based on the smell, the energy level of the staff and the wide variety of joint paper on sale in almost 100% sure the place is a front for weed.
We live across a back alley from a hookah bar that was called "A Buck R 2 Lounge". There's a shed in the back where all sorts of ATVs and dirt bikes meet up to terrorize the neighborhood/city, it sounds like we live in the middle of a motocross course. They recently painted the building black with purple trim (as hideous as it sounds) and put a new sign up proclaiming the establishment is now called "Rico's Rush". I wish someone would just burn the place down already, starting with the shed...
DeLorean Motor Company’s Midwest sales office used to be just down the street from me, up until a few months ago. Never saw anyone in it, but I think I did see a DeLorean outside it once.
Nice try, FBI.
Pretty much every small business in my village to be honest... I have never in my life seen any customer in there, and yet they have been open for years.
There is a person who sells bags on my high street. He has some cheap chiness watches up front, and actually uses the shop to sell fake watches (which is illegal, duh). I am 100% sure of it because I was going to buy one (but then I decided I would be too ashamed to wear a fake watch).
Also potentially a "tech" shop. Everything was so expensive, I've never seen people enter or leave, and when I asked about a device, they didn't evsn know the spscs for it. How the hell are you selling a computer if you don't know the specs for it? And why would a 32GB USB cost £12? Seems a bit much.
Every psychic in NYC
Pretty much all the vape shops, dessert shops and half the takeaways.
Sun bed/Tanning salons always got my suspicions!
We have a scrapbooking store in town that never seems to have business, if it's not a front it's a way to keep the family from getting inheritance
Car Washes. Over the past two years they’ve popped up everywhere and they all seem to be under different names.
Lots of massage parlors I'm sure are front for sexytime places.
There's a restaurant in my hometown of Lexington, KY called ""Frank and Dino's." It's owned by Carlo Baccarezza who has ties John Gotti, who was Italian mafia. He's a horrible person and has been sued by former employees of the restaurant for discrimination.
He opened this place just before the pandemic. It's supposed to be a fine-ish dining establishment with authentic Italian. The prices are high, but the food is terrible. It might be passable for someone who doesn't know authentic Italian. In any case, the restaurant sits empty most of the day, and it doesn't make sense to me why you would open a place like this and just allow it to have a terrible reputation that's mostly empty day in and day out.
Years ago I lived in a small town on the edge of a new town in the UK and there was a shop that was rarely open but was piled high with used car radios.
There is a thrift store in town with a carpet store attached, which is giant but 1/4th full. When we walked in the owner looked surprised we came to look at the thrift section. It was crap, and looked all untouched for a long long time
How Oxford Street is being reclaimed from American candy shops
Westminster Council has been cracking down on US sweet shops after many were discovered to be fronts for illegitimate businesses. In November 2022 one third of the stores had been shut down and by March 2023 the Met Police had seized £1 million worth of goods from the shops.
The solution is pretty sweet (pun intended):
A new initiative by Westminster Council called Meanwhile On: Oxford Street will allow up-and-coming businesses to open in the sites of closed-down candy shops without paying rent, while also having their business rates cut by 70 percent. The free rent will last for the first six months of the stores opening. It comes as part of a scheme to regenerate central London’s waning high street.
This pizza place opened in an area that is flush with well established takeaway spots. We ordered from it once and it was BAD. The bases were frozen and the meat was clearly sandwich meat from a supermarket. Whenever we pass it by, it's open but there are NEVER any customers.
The online reviews are bizarre, they're either one star reviews with detailed explanations of how shitty the food is or 5 star reviews with no comments.
Yet somehow this place is STILL open despite being surrounded by superior competition and always being empty. There is absolutely no way it's not a front for something.
I don’t even know where to start with this one…
There’s the “car wash and bistro”… yeah, they’re definitely serving more than just food in there
There’s the “carnival sweets and treats” that’s got no street sign or sign of any kind, for that matter, tucked in next to a coin laundry. It’s just some lady making funnel cakes, deep fried Oreos and other “carnival food”. As an added bonus, they have free arcade machines out front for you to play while you wait… yeah, I’m sure they bought those with all the money they’re raking in from fried dough…
I’ve got more but these are the two top fronts in my area for sure.
It's gone now but for a long time we had a 24hr fruit shop.
Our small, rural town had a bar change hands a couple times over the past few years. One day several murdered out Mercs, one an AMG, start parking in front of it. Not to stereotype, but they were greased up, wearing tracksuits and gold chains, guys from the Balkans are driving those cars and operating the bar. Never went in while they were around, but within a year, one of those guys got caught by DEA trying to move some serious weight of cocaine and meth.
The bar shut down pretty quickly after that.
There's a beauty supply place where the inside of the store is just rows and rows of generic amazon junk. The thing is .. that place gets extreeeemely high amounts of traffic and people even leave their engines running while visiting this place. It's just so suspicious seeing as the place is just a junk-shop for amazon teir beauty supplies
There’s a macaron shop near my work that has no business (!) being that large, downtown. It has a very fancy shopfront and website, I’ve called to pretend to order one time and it was quite expensive.
I’ve never even seen cars/vans/bikes/whatever taking away their order there (it’s delivery only).
It’s super weird, macarons are not even that popular around here, theres another better known macaron place that is tiny compared to this one
Not my town, but the town I used to live in had a store that appeared to only sell very old lampshades from the 1970s and I never saw a single customer go in there but it was always open. I'm 100% sure it was a front for the local crime syndicate.
Almost any cash only retail business in 2023 is highly suspect outside of some outlier situations like rural markets
There is a solar tanning parlor of sorts in a street close to us. I might just live in a bubble where noone would ever go to one of those parlors, but it seems to be open pretty late, and it feels like there are often some unsavoury people going in/coming out. It's become a running joke that it's a front, to be honest don't have a clue but I wouldn't surprise me.
There's a bar here that is a money wash for an outlaw biker gang. Everyone knows it. It's the worst kept secret in this town.
All my landlord's business associates are in the paradise papers. And half of his LinkedIn contacts are russian, so ...
There used to be one I just couldn't understand. It was one of those stores you commonly see on the road side with many products related to our local culture. They could theoretically make a ton of money selling that stuff to tourists if the store was next to a gas station or something, but it was deep inside the town in a very low traffic street, with no advertisement. Non-tourists would have a need for their products once every few years at most and it could be found on regular stores as well. There was just no way that store could be profitable.
But then they started selling rotisserie chicken and I became their regular. A couple years later they shut down.
Growing up, I would drive by a restaurant that was called the good view restaurant, it had a single small rectangular window at ceiling height on one side only and maybe three parking spaces that were always empty.
There's an Indian restaurant near me that has been there for years. I've never once seen more than 2 people in there and rarely any ubereats. I once went in to buy samosas and they seemed surprised. It's not a cheap neighborhood so I'm certain the place is a front more than anything.
When I lived in Burlington Vermont, the owner of the skate shop "ridin' high" got in trouble because he was selling drugs out of the skate shop.
Classic.
There's a store in my little town that sells gift bags, ballons and teddy bears. Never seen anybody in there, never seen the window display change. Keep in mind this isn't a party store. They only seem to sell those three things. Lord knows what they REALLY sell. Maybe "teddy bears" is slang for some new drug I don't know about.
Classic answer of a mattress store. We have a very busy interesting in town, and they are on all 4 corners. Prime real estate, never a car in the lot.
Absolutely - our local smoke shop in my towns plaza.
I used to live in this pretty small beachfront town. it was strange area- there were a few vegetarian/vegan restaurants in town but only one that served meat. a lot of animal lovers around, you know the vibe I mean. and so this one meat restaurant was hated by basically everyone, to the point that it was a running joke in town. nobody would be caught dead going in there. the thing is, it seemed as if the restaurant owner was trying aggressively to piss off the residents. the whole concept of the restaurant was basically to serve a pile of sloppy joe or something in a little metal pail? like basically trying to be as unapologetically gross as possible to make some kind of point about meat. and as you'd expect, I never once saw a customer in that restaurant. no employees ever seemed to be around either, just the owner. something was definitely fishy about it. I don't know how the owner got the money to keep that place running, since the place was open for at least 13 seasons. maybe his robot wife had a side hustle.
There was a chicken restaurant that had a hand painted sign which was poorly done. There were bars on the windows and the windows had ads for cigarettes and prepaid cellphones. It eventually got shut down due to distributing drug paraphernalia.
There was once, but the gang and I set a trap, caught the monster, and now it's just a pawn shop.
Several. But everyone knows they're most likely being used for money laundering. There's no way those strip clubs are profitable on their own.
My poor Rust Belt town, the downtown is slowly turning into a tourist trap. There was a very chichi high end retail children's store that has now been rebranded......using a non profit foundation's name...all owned by the same people. No one goes in or out, no one seems to work there. No one ever makes deliveries there of any kind, although they purport to be part of a non profit dedicated to sending care packages to comfort children in cancer hospitals. None of the clothing or toys ever change or get moved around, they're not even making an effort.
If there is, they got better opsec then me posting about this.
Where I am in AUS, it seems to be crane rental. I guess pretty easy just to invoice out a days rental and sit around doing nothing.
Hey zuck you need to be more relatable and normal..
Ok I shall get more Botox and facilitate a human barbeque with humans attending .
There was this business that was letting at 24:00 receipts on our tables that weren’t ours. And the girl was searching always what table didn’t have a receipt so she would give one randomly.
Either our “IRS” tax evasion works over night, or that store just makes blank receipts for drugs or other illegal acts. It was weird anyway, and self service. Wtf. Self service in the middle of the town in a beer bar pub like is just weird. Why did they have the waitress giving fake receipts then. Everything was so sketchy.
Pretty much everything with a :ukkkraine: flag. Even government agencies have changed their logos to include the piss-and-sky colour scheme.
Also every single Woolworth's in South Africa. They funnel money to Pissreal and charge like quadruple what literally every other store in South Africa charges for their fruits. The only times when it's ever worth it to step into a Woolies is to either protest or steal shit. How do they still remain in business is far beyond me.
I used to work on a military base. There were three different Chinese restaurants within a mile and a half of the front gate. All run by folks of East Asian descent, with barely more than a dozen sentences of English between them. Also, in one of them, I'm pretty certain I saw a satellite phone.
Maybe they were all just folks looking to make a better life in the States. But, I'm willing to bet that at least one of those folks was phoning home with over heard secrets.
