UK police have carried out a series of raids on barber shops suspected of being used as fronts for criminal activity such as money laundering.
The businesses are often advertised as Turkish barber shops, but are more often run by Kurds or Albanians, authorities said, and have been linked to hiding the profits of criminal people-smuggling gangs.
There are 18,411 barber shops registered in the UK but there has been a rapid expansion in recent years, with more than 750 opening in 2024 and a growth rate of more than 50 per cent since 2018, latest data indicates.
West Mercia Police, covering the English counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, is one force cracking down on barber shops. Bodycam footage shows its officers smashing through doors of premises and seizing money.
Dan Fenn, a detective inspector in West Mercia’s Economic Crime Unit, said the high cash turnover of these businesses made them “ideal for disguising illicit activities”.
“Whilst these businesses appear legitimate, they were actually tools for criminals to hide illegal cash flow,” he added.
After launching a dedicated operation to tackle the problem, the force carried out 33 raids, seizing more than £500,000 ($657,500) in illicit funds and arresting four people. Immigration officers made four further arrests.
Police, along with officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) and HMRC tax inspectors, have carried out raids across the UK on a number of barber shops and seized hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A representative of the NCA said the authority was “committed to disrupting the flow of illicit cash and preventing organised criminals from benefiting from their crimes”.
“Intelligence linking the use of barber shops, as well as other cash-intensive businesses, to money laundering and other criminality has risen in recent years,” they said.
“To respond to this threat the NCA has co-ordinated multi-agency law enforcement action targeting barber shops where suspicious activity has been identified, and there are possible connections to organised crime.”
Two high-profile Iraqi-Kurdish people smugglers based in the UK each ran barber shops to disguise their criminal activities.
Amanj Hasan Zada, 35, ran an operation in the city of Preston, Lancashire, co-ordinating small boat crossings, for which he was eventually sentenced to 17 years in jail last year.
Zada was seen in a YouTube video at a party with musicians singing in Kurdish, feting him as “the best smuggler”, while he threw cash at them and fired a gun in the air in apparent celebration. Three alleged people smugglers accused of being part of Zada's network were arrested in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region in January.
An investigation by The National revealed that action against Zada had forced some suspected of human trafficking, including a crime boss, into hiding.
Similarly, Hewa Rahimpur used his seemingly modest barber shop in East London as a front for a people-smuggling operation that transported 10,000 migrants across the English Channel in small boats, earning up to £260,000 for each trip. Rahimpur was sentenced to 11 years in prison in Belgium in 2023.