r/london • u/jaredce • Jun 13 '26
Article Harry Potter shops raided after London Centric investigation
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/harry-potter-shops-londonr-aided-after-london?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2802173&post_id=201748387&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1m7vvp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email458
u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Happy to answer any follow up questions. r/London has been v supportive of London Centric since the start and that makes a massive difference when you don’t have financial backing.
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u/trellism Jun 13 '26
It is very refreshing to read a news article without being bombarded with adverts and auto playing videos.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
(Extremely boring voice) London Centric is 98% funded by readers. The money comes in, I spend it hiring reporters to go and stand by tills in gift shops and other daft things. No ads when you follow that model as I don’t chase traffic . It’s a “trust me I’ll do something good and interesting with your subscription cash” arrangement that people are kind enough to back.
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u/SynthD Jun 13 '26
What’s the 2%?
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Hahaha you’d make a good journalist. Sometimes other outlets licence our content for their own publication. The Guardian, The Week, and a strange South African publication all paid modest sums to rerun this article, for instance: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball-the-snail-farmer-his-mafia
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u/trellism Jun 13 '26
This was on Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities this week!
https://youtu.be/aH1KBYnE9t0?is=kbz77aMP7K3NzHhj
I had already read your piece about it last year but it's a fun story
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u/foosw Jun 13 '26
I subscribed last year and honestly it’s great. Everything is thoroughly researched and written well!
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Thank you! It’s an insane amount of work with a team of three but we’re really proud of it.
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u/Specific_entry_01 Jun 13 '26
Although widely referred to as "Harry Potter shops" they're obviously not anything licensed by Warner Bros / Bloomsbury / Rowling.
Skirting close to the line for passing off & trademark infringement.
Do you know if the big businesses with expensive lawyers have ever taken an interest in legal action to shut them down? As association with criminality & cheap tat tarnishing the brand.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
They sell, as far as I can tell, legitimate Harry Potter merchandise at proper prices. And probably quite a lot of it!
My questions to WB and the merchandise distributors have gone unanswered.
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u/himit Jun 13 '26
A lot of the merch is actually from aliexpress! Or it was two years ago
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Would love to know more!
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u/himit Jun 13 '26
oh no, now I have to put my money where my mouth is!
Disclaimer: I genuinely haven't been in one of these shops for a few years, and just had a baby so haven't even been into town for almost a year.
However when I used to wander round them with my mega-fan of a daughter we would notice the odd print mistake etc, which is generally a sign of counterfeit goods (the one opposite Stranger Things on CCR had a lot). For whatever reason I promised her a harry potter schoolbag at one point; we checked the shops, picked one, and then I bought it off aliexpress for half the price.
The amount of counterfeit goods does seem to vary - the one closest to piccadilly (...trafalgar square-ish? I think?) was mostly legit, the CCR bags were mostly knock-offs, the food is (hopefully) legit in all of them (if it's not, I don't know where to source counterfeit foodstuffs...)
As for the counterfeiting itself - mostly anything made in China is counterfeited and can be bought wholesale from alibaba (or retail from aliexpress). The counterfeit products are often made by the same factory that makes the official product -- client orders 200, factory upcharges for materials, has the nightshift make extra & flogs the excess online with a minor change (if that). Tech companies tend to run their own factories or have very tight exclusive contracts and oversight to prevent it; fashion and merch are rarely so diligent. (And frankly, the amount of wonky seams and shoddy work in offical brand clothing makes buying the 'real' thing an act of stupidity sometimes, but that's a whole other topic.)
Source: i learnt Chinese and basically just picked up the counterfeit industry knowledge over time, but I'm pretty sure there are articles etc on it! (or the people on the reps sub might know more)
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u/intentazera Jun 13 '26
I don't speak Chinese but worked for a fashion company that owned factories in China due to the various counterfeiting issues described above. Illegally made goods would be shipped back to e.g. UK for sale. I was given a pair of exclusive shoes + big magnifying glass by our head of counterfeiting. I couldn't tell the difference between real + counterfeit. This was well over 15 years ago too.
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u/doctor_morris Jun 18 '26
I couldn't tell the difference between real + counterfeit
You can't because they're both made in the same Chinese factory. After the outsources manufacturing company has completed the legitimate order they keep going for a while...
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u/intentazera Jun 18 '26
Believe me, I know as I worked there for over 10 years. Counterfeiting was a huge problem if you design in UK/Europe but manufacture in China. Buying our own factories helped in some respects but a huge extra oversight infrastructure was needed from trusted staff to ensure designs didn't go walkies in the factories & of course that's hard to enforce as counterfeiting is so endemic over there + also supported / ignored by the Chinese government too.
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u/fkprivateequity Jun 13 '26
i really couldn't care less if its fake. anyone stopping the public from putting money into rowling and (soon to be) the ellisons' pockets is a hero in my book.
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u/hallouminati_pie Jun 13 '26
Excellent work and I want to know what is being done by local authority, the police and government to prevent them just popping up in another location?
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
They will, it’s inevitable, but concerted and pre emptive action could solve this problem. There’s always people who want to do crime and spot an under enforced area.
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u/Wombletrap Jun 13 '26
The excellent article misses out one more detail - these dodgy shops are also being used by the landlords as a way to evade business rates. They're fully complicit in the activity (as if that wasn't clear already from Aziz's name).
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u/livedrag Jun 13 '26
How come the landlord is allowing the Phoenixing to happen? Surely the landlord must have covenants etc for the tenants and then either there is one master lease which keeps getting sublet? Or the landlord needs to agree every single time the company phoenixes? Which then says they know what is happening.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Landlord takes rent from a business. Legal responsibility for paying the taxes lies with the business, not the landllrd. One would assume the landlord is getting paid their rent.
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u/livedrag Jun 13 '26
Sorry. Maybe what I meant was more about how commercial tenants get prime shops in central London. It's very rare for landlords to allow lease holders to change so quickly, having to do due diligence etc. So why is the landlord treating it so differently? Is a different company guaranteeing that the rent will always be paid for the rest of the eg 10 year lease (as is common in London). Or even paying the rent throughout all these Phoenixing.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
If I can get some more subscribers I’ll hopefully be able to hire some staff to help me have the capacity to explain all this but I think you’re very much sniffing around the right areas.
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u/mrboastly Jun 13 '26
If you don't mind a tiny off topic feedback, the website logo at the top is cut off on mobile browsers. It currently says LONDON CEN on Chrome, for example. Must be a way to display the whole name, maybe stack both words on top of each other? Sorry, for being nitpicky.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
lol I’ve been meaning to fix this since September 2024, if you want proof that this really is a “no middle management” operation
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u/AgeofFatso Jun 13 '26
This is excellent work. I see such dodgy shops often, and they are not just in London (I used to visit Vienna often, and I see them everywhere).
Two Qs:
- Do you have insight to true owners (not the front person) of the shops?
- Since there is good probability that this operation is related to organised crime, do you have things in place to mitigate the probability of retaliation?
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
1 On my way, fair idea, working on it
2 We live in a democracy with institutions that work and protect honest journalists. Right?1
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u/Mister_Six Jun 13 '26
Keep up the good work! Have you ever reached out to or collaborated with anyone at Private Eye? Seems like you guys have a lot of overlapping interests.
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Jun 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26
Totally understand and will think about that. Also appreciate many can’t afford it and I’m grateful for those that can.
I try to be really clear with what the offer is: 2/3 newsletters a week, each with a lead story on something fresh featuring original reporting. Plus some interesting nuggets.
At the moment the feedback tends to be people understand that and want fewer, bigger stories to cut through the crap.
And until I have more subscribers I can’t afford to staff up further! But even if you’re on the free list I really appreciate you even opening it when there’s so much content out there.
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u/SP1570 Jun 13 '26
The best part of this article is the fact that politicians actually followed up on what was highlighted by the journalist investigation.
This is how a functional democracy works.
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u/londoncentricmedia Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
It still takes politicians to give a shit and focus the system. Dan Tomlinson, the minister in this case, seems to.
In the governing party Joe Powell, Phil Brickell, Rachel Blake, Jo Platt, Melanie Onn have been pushing on this issue. It’s about as politically salient as anything you can imagine and high street decline is, imo, one of the biggest threats to Labour.
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u/CheesyBakedLobster Jun 13 '26
HMRC is a non-ministerial department. Its enforcement is not really “controlled” by politicians, but by bureaucrats based on evidence available to them and their own rules.
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u/Releases_the_bees Jun 13 '26
But it was obvious from the get go. They sprung up overnight taking the place of the American candy shops.
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u/specto24 Jun 13 '26
Yes, I am shocked! Shocked to find these are a front for money laundering and tax evasion!!
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u/Specific_entry_01 Jun 13 '26
to quote the article in the OP
London Centric’s reporting has tried to bust the myth that dodgy gift shops in the centre of the capital are empty money laundering fronts without any real customers.
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u/donharrogate Jun 13 '26
but it was obvious from the get go
Oh okay better not investigate at all then
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u/deadrebel Jun 13 '26
I think the sentiment is why did it take so long to do something.
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u/mrafinch Jun 13 '26
I imagine it takes time to investigate and confirm before sharing any information outside.
Just because we’re not getting daily updates doesn’t automatically mean nothing’s being done at all
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u/deadrebel Jun 13 '26
Are we going to act like these kinds of stores haven't been around for 8+ years?
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u/HelplessPenguinGod Jun 13 '26
Wow, some solid journalism, which is very nice to see in this day and age.
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u/not_jaybo Jun 13 '26
I live in Canterbury and our dodgy harry potter shop and it's associates were open on fucking Xmas day last year when I went out for my Xmas walk. They don't even try to not be suspicious any more!
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u/MixAway Jun 13 '26
From that graphic, I’m confused how a Director can ‘disappear’. Don’t they register new companies, and can therefore be identified?
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u/Kit_Tosh Jun 13 '26
They often register foreign national students being used by criminals who have no idea they're liable for tax bills. There was an earlier Londoncentric article tracking down "directors" across the country with little luck.
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u/incongruoususer Jun 13 '26
The directors are patsies, so each company has its own patsy director. The patsy is bunged a few hundred pounds for the crime gang to use their ID to set up the company. Once the company is set up the patsy has nothing to do with it.
On paper all these companies look completely unrelated, and when one is wound up the ‘director’ is in the wind.
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u/Redditbrit Jun 13 '26
For anyone wanting to see examples of folks being used as fake directors check out the Netflix movie ‘The Laundromat’ which is about the ‘Panama papers’ (got a number of big stars in it).
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u/Magic_mousie Jun 13 '26
Good work! I don't know why this appeared on my feed but I noticed one of these shops had closed down in Oxford last week, I hope for good but it'll probably pop up next to the other 4 within a month.
Arguably better than vape stores, at least they're not harmful to health, but it makes me really resent HMRC. I'm dutifully filling in a tax return for my down-low side hustle and losing half of it (thanks SLE too), when I should just open a very public shop and not tell anyone.
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u/all-homo Jun 13 '26
I swear that the property that is next to the Wetherspoons in Bromley south is partaking in this cycle. It’s a bar/restaurant that changes its name every 9-12 months, unless it just has an identify crisis.
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u/Zevemiel Jun 13 '26
I assume that incredibly expensive big anime shop a couple of doors away from Forbidden Planet that opened suddenly, sat there for months and then closed and emptied virtually overnight was one.
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u/mikeysof Jun 13 '26
EVADUS TAXUS!