Turkish barber shops around the UK are being raided due to concerns that premises are being used by crime gangs for money laundering, tax fraud and illegal migrant work.
The National Crime Agency (NCA), Britain’s FBI, has launched an investigation and has overseen dozens of raids in the past month, seizing tens of thousands of pounds in the process.
Officers at the NCA have joined forces with local police officers, immigration enforcement officers and HM Revenue and Customs inspectors to carry out the raids in towns and cities across Britain.
It is suspected that many of the barber shops are being used as a front to launder drug money or to provide work for illegal migrants.
In some salons, tax inspectors were reportedly watching the number of chairs in use at a salon to work out if the profits declared by the business corresponded to the number of customers.
One official told The Sunday Times that some streets have multiple barbers all declaring large takings despite being empty most days.
More than 750 barber shops opened in the UK last year, according to retail analytics company Green Street.
Since 2018 the number has increased by more than 15 per cent to more than 18,000.
Many of the shops operating as Turkish barbers are being run by Albanians or Kurds with links to people smuggling or drugs.
Traditional Turkish-style barbers are known for stylish haircuts usually complete with a hot towel and cut-throat razor.
Now many are being investigated by the NCA, using a combination of raids alongside friendly visits to premises to try and gain more information.
A spokesperson for the NCA said: ‘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.
‘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 where there are possible connections to organised crime.
‘This has involved a large number of police forces across England and Wales, as well as other partners, including HMRC and the Home Office’s immigration enforcement department.’
In the UK barbers do not have to register as a business with Companies House, as they can chose to operate as a sole-trader. They can then let individual chairs to hairdressers.
The recent explosion in Turkish barber shops along British high streets has fuelled widespread suspicions of organised criminal activity as numbers have increased by 50 per cent in the last six years to around 19,000.
It was the arrest of the lynchpin of a huge Channel people-smuggling ring in 2022 that first brought the activities of some of the more dubious barber shops to the attention of the NCA.
Hewa Rahimpur, 30, and his gang of fellow Iranian Kurds were detained on suspicion of bringing 10,000 migrants into Dover from the French coast on small boats.
Rahimpur, who had arrived in the UK illegally and was granted asylum after claiming to have suffered ‘political oppression’ in his home country, was driving a top-of-the-range Mercedes when he was caught by police.
His gang had netted £13 million in cash from the crossings and it needed to be laundered somehow, so Rahimpur, a former barber, entered the hairstyling business a few years ago in Camden, North London.
He was extradited from the UK to stand trial in Belgium last year and is now serving an 11-year sentence for people-trafficking.
However, the suspicions surrounding Turkish barbers has led many in the profession tosee their reputation become tarnished.
In a second high-profile trial, 33-year-old Albanian Gul Wali Jabarkhel was accused of using his barber shop in Colindale, North London, as a base for a smuggling racket in which he tried to recruit lorry drivers to bring migrants to the UK hidden in their cargo.
After realising police were watching him, in 2020 Jabarkhel fled to Kabul, Afghanistan. It was only when he tried to return to the UK a year later by hiring one of the same lorry drivers he had used to smuggle in migrants, that two of his associates were caught handing over £7,500 for the deal at the London Gateway Services on the M1 and arrested for money-laundering offences.
Both of them claimed the money was to buy barbering equipment, but the authorities had been monitoring their mobile phones and text messages and knew this was false.
Jabarkhel was convicted alongside three others after a trial two years ago at Kingston Crown Court for his role in what the NCA described as a ‘ruthless operation when human beings were little more than goods to profit from’.
Money-laundering salons have also been linked to terrorism. West London snipper Tarek Namouz, proprietor of Boss Crew Barbers, was sentenced to 12 years last year for sending £11,000 to Syria to ‘purchase weapons and explosives’ to use against President Assad’s government forces.
The barber, who lived above his salon in Hammersmith, boasted to a prison visitor while on remand awaiting trial that he had actually managed to get out £25,000 to the Islamic State supporters he was financing.
Last year Reeza Jafari told that he has had enough of those who harbour suspicions about the massive rise in Turkish barbers.
The 31-year-old runs Pasha in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He was born and raised in Tehran, Iran but his family come from Uzbekistan originally and he has now been living in the UK for 16 years.
He said: ‘People assume that if you own a Turkish barbers than you must have something to hide, that you have these links to organised crime.
‘But in most cases, it’s not true. We just want to make money and have a livelihood like anyone else.
‘But the small number of bad ones are harming the good ones. Those that exist just to launder cash for criminals reflect badly on us all because we get viewed the same way.’
Speaking in 2023, Former Metropolitan Police officer Ali Hassan Ali said: ‘Right across High Streets we have seen a boom in barbers opening up since the pandemic. A lot of these shops have thousands of pounds of equipment but no customers.
‘While in some cases the shops will be involved in legitimate business, from my own experience, there is strong reason to believe a large number, particularly those owned by Albanians, Turks and Kurds, have links to organised crime.
‘This can be people-smuggling and in some cases drugs.’