{"id":40052,"date":"2025-10-27T22:01:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T22:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/police-target-barbers-and-vape-shops-in-organised-crime-raids\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T22:01:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T22:01:07","slug":"police-target-barbers-and-vape-shops-in-organised-crime-raids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/police-target-barbers-and-vape-shops-in-organised-crime-raids\/","title":{"rendered":"Police target barbers and vape shops in organised crime raids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-component=\"text-block\">\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">Police are raiding more than 150 high street businesses in Scotland as part of a major operation against organised crime.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">Officers targeted convenience stores, barbers and vape shops suspected of being fronts for crime gangs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">Detectives believe shops are being used for money-laundering, selling illicit tobacco products and committing immigration and tax offences.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">It comes as part of the UK-wide Operation Machinize, which was <a target=\"_self\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c3677xzk56no\" class=\"sc-f9178328-0 iCaRzc\">launched by the National Crime Agency (NCA) earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div data-component=\"text-block\">\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">BBC Scotland News followed officers from Police Scotland, Immigration Enforcement and His Majesty&#8217;s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) as they raided two premises in the east end of Glasgow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">On Monday, officers raided 13 businesses in Glasgow, Fife and Forth Valley.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">In total they seized 4000 illicit cigarettes, 5.4kg of tobacco and reported seven people for benefit fraud offences.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">One man was identified as having no right to work in the UK.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">Det Insp Jason Nichol, of Police Scotland&#8217;s serious organised crime unit, said: &#8220;It&#8217;s a UK wide operation into serious and organised crime and money laundering.<\/p>\n<p class=\"sc-9a00e533-0 eZyhnA\">&#8220;They use vulnerable people as staff and we are looking to disrupt that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/cvgkn0dze2ko?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Police are raiding more than 150 high street businesses in Scotland as part of a major operation against organised crime. Officers targeted convenience stores, barbers and vape shops suspected of being fronts for crime gangs. Detectives believe shops are being used for money-laundering, selling illicit tobacco products and committing immigration and tax offences. It comes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[12417,1920,12418,599,1886,1655,1605,7329],"class_list":["post-40052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scotland","tag-barbers","tag-crime","tag-organised","tag-police","tag-raids","tag-shops","tag-target","tag-vape"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40052"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40054,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40052\/revisions\/40054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}