Asklemmy

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.

Mattress stores that stay open 24/7, pretty sure you send them a mattress full of cash and they deliver you a mattress full of coke

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 :(

Town of 20k people, we had a wool shop... just sold wool only. Always thought it was a front, years later found out they won the lotto(2mil) blew it all keeping the wool shop open almost 10 years with zero customers lol

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.

There is a Psychic and Tarot card place in my town that I never see anyone going in or out of but always has at least two or three high end sports cars in the parking lot. Something is paying for those cars and it ain’t palm reading.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Gyms are all fronts for...gyms. I mean, the gym business is corrupt enough that I feel like that counts.

I'm not saying all cash-only bars are laundering money, but I am saying that the owner is probably at the very least not declaring all of their profits.

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

Nice try, detective

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.

Nice try FBI.

There's a microwave repair store in my city.

There's always one person there when I dive by but never any customers. There's a neon open/closed sign that changes daily so someone is there.

No clue what exactly is going on there.

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.

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.

I live in Vegas.

Where do I even begin????

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.

There's a road near my house that has over ten barber shops on it. The road is about half a mile long. I'm not sure of the percentage, but they can't all be legit.

Every mattress store

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.

Matress stores.

Never see anyone in them, never see anyone in the parking lot, and every time i've ever gone in there was one person working there who acted surprised as hell someone came in.

and yet they are always expanding and building more locations

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.

Art galleries.

I used to live in a town with no less than three scuba shops.

It was not on the water.

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.

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

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 .

Slightly related: I just assume any business that operates on a cash-only basis is commiting tax fraud.

Burrito place near me. They cost $3 for a regular and then $5 for a specialty. No way they're surviving on that much money renting in a strip mall. I only ever see 1 or 2 other people in there at most even during lunch or dinner

Local roofer is a front for his coke buisness.

The roofing contractor with the lowest score in my town is known for doing a bad job. It's also known that he is the largest coke dealer in the city.

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?

This town has about 20k residents, yet we have multiple phone accessory stores. They have racks full of covers for phones I have not seen in years.

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.

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 is this wig shop in a very popular and pricey area in my town. It's been there since my mom was a child.

The wigs exposed are old fashioned, ugly, never change and we've never seen the shop open. Its super weird. I'm convinced it has to be a cover for something.

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.

This tiny hidden pizzaria place that is always closed for private meetings. Called Pizzaria Mafiosi. Hidding in plain sight.

My barber used to have basicallyno customers, his family members as the employees (shite) and one day went ahead and got cctv cameras installed and had a backroom that was well protected. Later the shop and the people mysteriously disappeared suddenly.