Middle Eastern gangs are using rundown shops in the UK as a front to sell illegal tobacco. The immigrants working for them are victims of modern slavery, investigators tell VICE World News.
The sniffer dog pawed eagerly at a length of skirting board behind the counter of a high street convenience store in Derbyshire, East Midlands.
It was the kind of shop stocked with cheap, plastic tat and forlorn rows of long-life groceries arranged sparingly on dusty shelves.
Pulling out the wooden board from the floor, investigators heard noises from behind the wall. Moving aside a heater mounted on slide rails revealed a secret room, accessed by a hole in the wall.
Inside was a young man, holed up on a mattress with a large stash of a valuable, illicit commodity – cigarettes.
The young man’s job was to push them out through the skirting board, tugging it back into place with a length of chain. Trading standards investigators would later learn that the man was being paid just £20 a day to take orders from the front counter via a microphone linked to a bluetooth speaker.
The incident is one of an increasing number unearthed by trading standards investigators in the UK involving a new form of modern slavery, largely hidden from sight on Britain’s austerity-hit high streets, where cut-price convenience stores are used as fronts for an illegal tobacco industry reliant on the exploitation of asylum seekers and illegal economic immigrants.
Robin Eveleigh – Vice – 2022-01-17.
Want More Investigative Content?
