‘It’s not unusual for them to put in £10,000’
CANNABIS shop manager Tom Barber is happy to close his doors when customers ask for privacy to deposit huge bundles of cash into his bitcoin ATM.
His Skunk House store on Croydon High Street sells a range of drug paraphernalia – but the most popular purchase is bitcoin.
‘It’s been great for business,’ he said. ‘We get ten to 20 people using the ATM a day.
‘It’s not unusual for people to put in £10,000 in a day. We have had everyone from businessmen trying to hide from the taxman, to college students, to immigrants sending money home.
‘I’ve had to close the shop for half an hour and get the machine emptied and filled again so that one guy could deposit £14,000 in one go.
‘There is a £500 limit per transaction on the machine, but the number of transactions you can do a day is limitless.
‘You don’t get to hear what the money is for, but it would not surprise me if drug dealers were using it.
‘There was one drug dealer I heard that was about to get caught so he put everything he had into bitcoin. When he came out of prison, the value had gone up so much he bought a house.’
He said he believed bitcoin was used to make purchases on the Dark Web – the secret part of the internet frequented by, among others, pornographers, criminals and terrorists.
Daniel Jenkinson, who owns The Vapour Trail in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, has seen more than £100,000 deposited at his vape store’s bitcoin ATM in the past three months. He said 90 per cent of users are either business people or curious investors. His machine is provided by Alpha Vend, which pays him 30 per cent of the commission it makes on every deposit.
Mr Jenkinson, 28, insisted he had seen no evidence of criminals using his ATMs to launder money.