Amsterdam toughens stance against souvenir shops suspected of money laundering

Amsterdam is stepping up its fight against souvenir shops that act as fronts for criminals to launder their drug money. The city is sending special control teams to check its many souvenir shops for suspicious activities, RTL Nieuws reports.

“We see a lot of shops where hardly anyone enters,” Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema said. “You cannot pay thousands of euros in rent from one customer a day who buys a lighter. Then you know it is a business model that cannot legally exist.”

Amsterdam residents may think that these money laundering fronts don’t affect them. “But things like this reduce the range of shops,” Halsema explained. Dodgy tourist shops funded with criminal money also drive up rents and displace regular entrepreneurs. “Criminal activities rarely stand alone. They cause more violence in the city. Sooner or later, an explosive may be placed in front of buildings where this happens. This means there is also a risk for people living around it.”

Hence the special teams checking for suspicious activity. An RTL reporter accompanied the team one day. On that day, they found a store that was only open for six days in the entire month of October. Another store had no glass doors in front of the refrigerators, resulting in towering energy bills. Not worrying about that is a sign that more may be going on, an inspector said.

“We have handed out approximately 5,000 euros in fines, seized over 250 counterfeit items, caught an employee in benefit fraud, and found evidence of underground banking,” action coordinator Bert Hogema summarized the afternoon’s work. That may not seem like much, given the estimated billions of criminal money flowing through a city like Amsterdam. But it also sends the signal that criminals will not go unnoticed.

According to 2020 figures from the platform Kijk op Ondermijining, Amsterdam counted 960 companies whose owner, director, or the company itself had been convicted of a drug offense in the past. 130 Amsterdam companies had a money laundering conviction connected to them.

“Souvenir shops are a vulnerable sector for money laundering,” Job van Beekhoven of the anti-undermining organization RIEC said to RTL. “Tourists often pay with cash, which makes it easy to mix that money with criminal drug money.”