r/Glasgow Tools

They're profitable because it's cheap ice cream sold for a huge mark up and the vans aren't exactly expensive to get your hands on and kit out.

I'm quite sure at least some of them will be a front - perhaps for seling drugs out of the van, but money laundering would be a strong contender. Not for any really big operation generating dirty cash, unless they were operating a fleet of ice cream vans alongside other "legitimate businesses". But I've never personally seen an ice cream van that takes card. It's a cash-based business and it's very normal for them to not bother generating receipts of any kind on actual transactions, so if they happen to introduce a bunch of cash income they don't have receipts for, that won't really be an immediate cause for concern. How do you prove it *wasn't* from the van selling ice cream, after all?

It's kinda like how tanning salons used to crop up everywhere - a lot of them were fronts for money laundering. My own tiny wee village had something like 4 on the main street, 3 of which were owned by the same family. All of them exclusively took cash. All of them had a couple of branded cars.

As to being easy for police to track - ehh. Depends. Given that I expect the dodgy ones to be on the money laundering side of things rather than actual drug dealing, your standard police aren't really taking anything to do with money laundering. Those are really complex cases conducted by specialists and can take years to reach a point where the evidence is strong enough to do anything. It's difficult to prove. Plus it'll be interlinked with other investigations into the actual activity that generates the dirty money in the first place and it's all a matter of which case reaches a point that it'll stick enough to send them to prison. Kinda like how it was well known that Al Capone was involved in gang activities, but the thing they got him on was tax fraud.