When Detective Inspector Stephen Weller and his team closed in on suspected money launderer Ali Raza, 43, they didn’t know exactly what to expect – would he be a big fish or a small minnow in the world of organised crime?
It didn’t take them long to find out. Within days of putting Raza in handcuffs, they had closed down an operation thought to have laundered £190million for some of Britain’s most dangerous drugs gangs, and seized £2.5million in cash and gold.
It was the biggest haul in the City of London Police’s history, yet it centred on a modest cash transfer shop – Rana Money Exchange Ltd – doing business in plain sight on a bustling high street in east London.
‘It was a favourite place for gangs to launder their money – British, Albanians, Russians, all sorts of criminals dealing mainly in drugs,’ says DI Weller, from City Police’s Serious Organised Crime Team.
‘It was very professional and highly discreet. When we went in, we didn’t know what we’d find, but it immediately became clear this was something big. There was so much cash and gold that could only have come from organised crime.
‘We had evidence that on one occasion a Russian organised crime group came with a suitcase containing £1million in cash. And when we arrested Raza, he was wearing a makeshift money belt stuffed with £150,000 in £50 notes. I’d seen huge volumes of cash before, but never experienced a clandestine money belt with that much cash in it. It was incredible.’
Yesterday, Raza and his sidekick, Adeel Aslam, 42, both from Ilford, east London, were sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court. Raza, the head of the operation, pleaded guilty and was given four years and eight months. Aslam, who went to trial and was found guilty by a jury, was sentenced to two years and two months in prison.
Operation Flood, as City Police called the investigation, had its roots in another spectacular police exercise, Operation Venetic, run by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
For three months, the Operation Venetic team had access to an encrypted communications network called EncroChat. This was a messaging service used by top criminals worldwide because it was supposed to be completely secure.
Bank notes recovered from the raid on the property in east London
It was first hacked by French police during an investigation into organised crime. Gaining access to millions of real-time text messages sent between EncroChat’s 60,000 users from March to June 2020, the French helped agencies all over Europe get into the system.
In turn, they used the information to arrest criminals, seize drugs, cash, guns and counterfeit currency, and save the lives of hundreds of assassination targets involved in criminal feuds.
To date, the NCA investigation, in partnership with police forces across the country, has led to more than 1,600 offenders being imprisoned for a total of 10,700 years. More than £80million has been seized from gangsters, as well as at least 170 guns, six tonnes of cocaine, three of heroin and 20 of cannabis.
City of London Police’s Operation Flood was launched after it was alerted by the NCA to exchanges between two EncroChat subscribers with the usernames ‘palefog’ and ‘chrisseven’ in which money laundering was discussed.
Palefog turned out to be Albanian drug dealer Taulant Stoica, 39, who was jailed for ten years in 2022 after his EncroChat messaging revealed £1.4million in cocaine deals. Chrisseven was Raza.
DI Weller and his colleagues established that Raza had been running a legal business in High Street North, East Ham, in tandem with the illicit money laundering operation.
‘It was the kind of service you see on many high streets that would legitimately use Western Union or Ria Money Transfer for people in migrant communities to send money back to their family,’ he says.
‘The business would take a small commission from the money sent – that’s the lawful business model and it’s an essential part of the community. But the premises were partitioned. Half formed a luggage shop, and we think the rest was where criminals would bring in their cash to be laundered.’
Ali Raza, from Ilford, east London, was sentenced to four years and eight months
His sidekick, Adeel Aslam, 42, also from Ilford, was sentenced to two years and two months
Raza would take a consignment of dirty money and, often within hours, transfer a similar sum to an international location of the client’s choice, minus his commission.
‘In his plea, he said he took between six and seven per cent,’ says DI Weller. ‘So, if I’m the person who wants money cleaned, I give you a hundred thousand pounds, you take six to seven thousand pounds out as your commission, but I know that I will get my £93,000-94,000 released in a foreign jurisdiction.’
Aslam supported the operation on a day‑to‑day basis, co-ordinating cash collections and assisting with the movement of high‑value sums on behalf of the organised crime groups.
Since money-exchange business is often conducted with cash, there was plenty of it washing about in the company anyway – which made it easier to launder some of the dirty proceeds.
Using a network of international outlets that Raza controlled, police say that between May 2019 and June 2020, he transferred or smuggled more than £190million out of the country. The money was either physically transported or moved using electronic transfers through Dubai, from where the network was co-ordinated.
Dubai and the UAE were the most popular hubs for the cash. Once there, it is believed much of it was put into property and investments that would generate a ‘clean’ income for gang kingpins.
In June 2020, the administrators of EncroChat began to suspect the system had been compromised. It then warned its subscribers to destroy their phones – but law enforcement was ahead of them. City of London Police officers arrested Raza in an underground car park in nearby Walthamstow two days before the alert went out.
When searched, Raza was found to be wearing the money belt containing £150,000. ‘That felt like the start of a good operation, but it got even better,’ says DI Weller.
More than 20 officers raided the cash transfer shop and found £1.8million in a safe. Crucially, they found Raza’s EncroChat phone, still live and full of messages and contact details.
It was a discovery that would give him no choice but to plead guilty to laundering £14million between March 23 and June 12, 2020. This was just the period detectives were able to monitor the EncroChat exchanges, but officers believe the small high street money shop had laundered far more.
Upon executing a warrant at Raza’s home in Ilford, they found $300,000 (£220,000) in a sports bag. And while searching the money shop, they found receipts for a safety deposit box at a nearby storage facility (whose location is being kept secret for security reasons). They applied for a warrant to search it – and found 2.5kg of gold bullion worth about £270,000 as well as bags stuffed with UAE dirham notes.
An image from the police operation to crack the money laundering ring
‘It was a very unusual operation, not only because of the EncroChat angle, but also because it was in the middle of Covid – it was a perfect storm of unusual circumstances,’ says DI Weller.
‘So when you know you’re going to conduct an executive action, you want to make sure no one at the premises gets hurt while also gathering as much evidence as you can. We went through the doors and did that successfully.
‘For me, the big question was: “What if the phone’s not there?” because, ultimately, that is the thread that’s going to tie everything else together. But we got it and, once we had that, I felt our objective had been achieved.
‘Finding all the cash and gold was further validation of our suspicions and hard work.’
When detectives looked into Raza, who is British, and Aslam, who is Pakistani, they found two surprisingly unremarkable men. Neither had a criminal record, nor were known to the police.
They each lived quiet lives in modest homes in Ilford, a neighbourhood not known for crooks living the high life. DI Weller says there was no evidence of either men throwing money around or buying high-end luxury goods. Raza did splash out on a 4×4 vehicle – but a sensible Toyota model.
‘Raza is very unassuming, and he’s clearly a smart enough man to be able to have run this enterprise, because money laundering isn’t an easy crime to commit,’ says DI Weller.
‘It takes knowledge and skill. To be an enabler on this level, you have to be relatively intelligent and very switched on to how to launder all these funds. It’s not something you can do overnight.’
It is not clear how a mild-mannered person of previously good character became involved in such high-level criminality, but DI Weller has his suspicions.
Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, the maximum prison sentence for money laundering is 14 years, an unlimited fine, or both
‘Often with organised crime it’s an incremental shift,’ he says. ‘You start doing something small, and you realise there’s a margin there, and it just gets exponentially bigger.’
Money shops such as Raza’s – 878 nationally – are regulated by HM Revenue and Customs, which calls them ‘money services businesses’. They must also register with the Financial Conduct Authority and key personnel, such as Raza, are required to pass integrity and competence checks. He passed them all.
I asked HMRC how it had failed to spot £190million in money laundering centred on a modest outlet in East Ham. I also asked whether this could be just the tip of a very big iceberg.
It replied: ‘The majority of money service firms are legitimate and they perform an essential function for the community.
‘But where we identify non-compliance we work with law enforcement partners to bring those laundering money to justice. In this case, we acted on intelligence from police partners to close the business down.’
The HMRC supervises 36,000 businesses across nine different financial sectors and says it carries out ‘strict checks’ on individuals to prevent criminals and terrorists taking advantage of them.
It provides businesses with guidance, risk assessments and online tools to prevent money laundering. Where it finds evidence of wrongdoing, it can close down businesses and initiate civil and criminal prosecutions.
Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, the maximum prison sentence is 14 years, an unlimited fine, or both. And any cash and assets accrued as a result of such enterprises can be seized.
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However, there will always be clever individuals who find ways to avoid detection. Professor Michael Levi, a government adviser and the recipient of lifetime research prizes from American, British and European societies of criminology, says he isn’t surprised Raza’s operation went undetected before the EncroChat hack, in spite of its scale.
‘Where people like him are not frontline offenders such as fraudsters or drug dealers, and where they don’t get into personally self-destructive behaviours such as extreme gambling, sex and drug habits that might otherwise draw the attention of the authorities, they probably won’t be subjected to further checks,’ he says.
‘[Raza] may have been an intermediate money launderer in the sense that perhaps he didn’t start out intending be one. But if he’s making money from it and goes under the radar, then there isn’t such a big incentive to stop.
‘He could have closed down the operation and left the country when he’s made his money, but possibly he decided it was too lucrative.
‘As economists like to say, small is beautiful and, in this case, it seems to have worked in favour of the money laundering operation.’
DI Weller and his team are proud of smashing a vast criminal enterprise that might never have been discovered were it not for the EncroChat investigation. I ask him how significant Operation Flood was.
‘I think we removed a critical piece of London money laundering infrastructure, and I suspect that caused widescale disruption to a number of organised crime groups,’ he replies. ‘It has motivated my team and the group I work with to go and look for it and to be a lot more targeted.
‘Criminals do what they do for no purpose other than to make money. But if you haven’t got the infrastructure to launder that money and get it out of criminal circulation, there’s no motivation for the crime.
‘I’m really pleased with the impact the investigation had. But I also reflect on the fact that if this operation can persist in plain sight, how many others could be out there?’
