The astonishing underworld of Bicester Village: How the Chinese tourists who come flocking are often buying designer bags and watches destined for a VERY sinister purpose

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS, TV CRITIC Published: 00:59, 16 July 2026 | Updated: 00:59, 16 July 2026 How much cash have you got on you? Perhaps 50 quid in your wallet? Less than that – just a handful of coins in a purse or a pocket? How about around the house? The days when most people kept an emergency roll of tenners at the back of a drawer, let alone stashing their life savings under the mattress, are as outdated as the ten-shilling note. You might assume that cash has almost disappeared. And in one way, you’d be right. For many of us, every purchase is made digitally: Tap-and-go at the shop counter, an app for the parking meter and so on. Investigative crime reporter Oliver Bullough reckons almost half the British population now use cash just once a month or not at all. The same is broadly true in Europe and the US. Yet around the world, mints are printing more money than ever before. In April 2024, as the banknote manufacturing machines at Fort Worth, Texas, worked overtime, the value of dollars in circulation hit an all-time high: $2.33trillion. That’s double the quantity of cash in the financial system a decade earlier... which itself was double the total of ten years before that. It is estimated that the total circulating value of the euro, the European Union’s single currency, is more than 1.5 trillion – more than three times as much money as existed before the 2008 banking crisis. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, calls this the ‘paradox of banknotes’: While the value of cash in circulation is forever increasing, the variety of ways to spend it is constantly decreasing. ‘Where on earth are the banknotes going?’ Bullough asks. ‘Who is spending them? What are they buying? And why does no one appear to care?’ It is as if, he says, despite the popularity of Netflix, YouTube and all the other online video providers, ‘video cassette production was repeatedly hitting new highs’. So who has all this money? Bullough’s theory, outlined in his new book Everybody Loves Our Dollars, is simple: If it isn’t part of the legal economy, it must by definition be in the hands of criminals, as the currency of terrorism, people trafficking and slavery, and the drugs trade. It’s thought at least 80 per cent of Chinese tourists visit the luxury Bicester Village shopping complex in Oxfordshire  In the UK, there is, in theory, £1,300 in cash in circulation for every man, woman and child. Yet the amount we actually have is far less, perhaps £200 each on average. The same is even more starkly true in the States, says Bullough: $7,357 is in circulation per person and yet each person only has $418 in notes on average. Tellingly, about 80 per cent of the missing money consists of $100 bills. The big bills are easier to hide and to transport than bundles of lower denomination notes, so they are better suited to criminal activity. This is a recent development. Two decades ago, in the US, there were more $20 bills than $100 bills in circulation and more $1s than $20s. This made sense, in an economy where most people still paid for small purchases such as coffees, cab rides and chocolate bars with cash. But by 2008, the C-note or $100 banknote existed in greater numbers than the $20. Eight years later, it overtook the $1. In Europe almost half the euros in circulation are in big denominations: 100s, 200s and 500s. There is, as Bullough points out, a brutally simple solution. If higher denomination banknotes are no longer useful to law-abiding people, governments should take them out of circulation. Criminals would either be forced to declare their holdings, and try to explain their wealth away, or be left with tons of waste paper. But that would deprive the governments of a significant slice of their own income. It’s enormously valuable for a nation to be able to print its own currency and exchange it for the currency of other countries. And so the gangs continue to be the biggest customers for governments churning out stacks of high-value banknotes. According to David Veness, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police: ‘The link between Medellin [hub of the Colombian cocaine cartels] and Moscow [crime capital of the world] is the $100 bill. Untraceable, untaxable income is the new lingua franca of organised crime.’ In other words, cash is the language spoken by all organised crime gangs. A Europol report in 2015 emphasised that cash is ‘still overwhelmingly the prevalent form of financial instrument for criminals’. Big denomination bills are so popular that, in countries such as Argentina and Ethiopia, they trade at a higher rate of exchange. Criminals will pay more of the local currency to get a $100 banknote than for 100 $1 bills. That’s because it’s far easier to smuggle one $100 bill through customs than it is to conceal 100 single dollar notes. Smugglers are as ingenious in hiding cash as they are with drugs. Money can be hidden inside practically anything, from beauty products to confectionery, children’s toys to the human body itself. But a wad of notes is bulky... so they’d better be high-value bills. Drugs gangs vacuum-pack their cash, concealing it behind the panels in cars and trucks, or behind the insulation in yachts, usually between $150,000 to $500,000 at a time. According to US authorities, $25billion is smuggled in cash across the American border into Mexico every year. And in Britain, where Albanian gangs took over the cocaine market in 2016, the amount of cash flowing from the UK to Albania has multiplied sixfold, from £65million a year to £400million. There are other ways to take cash out of the country, though. One of the most popular is also the most obvious: Just buy things with it. For Chinese criminal gangs, there’s a favourite way to convert banknotes into portable capital that can be openly transported across borders. They give it to students and tourists who spend it on ‘souvenirs’, that are taken back to China and handed over to the gangmasters for resale. This, Bullough says, helps to explain why Bicester Village shopping centre exerts such an extraordinary attraction for Chinese visitors. It’s thought at least 80 per cent of Chinese tourists visit the luxury shopping complex in Oxfordshire. In fact, an estimated one million of its 6.4 million annual visitors are believed to be Chinese – four times as many as visit Buckingham Palace. An estimated one million of Bicester Village shopping centre's 6.4 million annual visitors are believed to be Chinese – four times as many as visit Buckingham Palace The faux high street is 660 yards long and crammed with cut-price designer outlets: Burberry, Gucci and Giorgio Armani, Prada, Balenciaga and Stella McCartney, Versace, McQueen and Vivienne Westwood, among more than 150 top names. Three-quarters of Chinese shoppers arrive there by train from Marylebone, with announcements and signs in Mandarin to guide them through the stations at both ends. The attraction lies partly in the discounts on offer, often around 40 per cent of the recommended retail price. Tax breaks are another enticement, since goods purchased in Britain but left unused until the buyers return to China, are not subject to VAT. Before Bicester Village opened in 1995, it was, ‘a wet field containing two old horses and a fallen-down shed,’ said a PR executive who worked on the launch. Now its sales per square foot are among the highest in the world. Coincidentally, in 1995 the estimated number of tourists visiting the UK from China was 500. In 2025 it was nearly 500,000, and is rising so fast that, by the end of this year, it’s expected to hit 667,000 – a 28 per cent increase. It is not as if China lacks its own shopping meccas. The two largest outlets in the world are the New South China Mall in Dongguan and the Golden Resources Mall in Beijing. Yet a million Chinese shopaholics come to Bicester every year – and by Bullough’s estimate, they spend up to £6million a day or £2billion annually. Many of the shoppers are not spending their own money. And they will not keep the goods. Instead, they are part of the endless money-churning operation that funds international organised crime. At the start of the loop are factories in China producing drugs, especially ketamine and synthetic opioids, which are shipped to British gangs for illegal distribution. These drugs are sold via sophisticated networks to individual users, for cash. It’s an incredibly profitable business, as lucrative as it is toxic. But it has a drawback: Because the cash is the proceeds of crime, it has to be ‘laundered’ or filtered back into the official system, to render it clean. The solution is for the drug gangs to give the cash to ordinary people to spend on portable luxuries – designer clothes, watches, handbags and suitcases. Anyone carrying more than £10,000 in cash out of the country must, by law, declare it to HM Customs but there is no restriction on how expensive a watch or hand luggage can be. There’s a peculiar irony in the idea that money launderers carting designer goods through an airport will probably be using even more designer goods, such as a set of Louis Vuitton travel trunks, to do it. When they arrive back in China, they hand over the goods to the gangs, who will either sell them to the domestic market or export them for resale. The students and tourists will probably get their flights and accommodation for free and they might also be paid, though they could also be acting under duress, terrified of retribution against their families or threats to their own lives. The famous shopping centre features more than 150 cut-price designer outlets with sales among the highest in the world None of this is to suggest that anyone involved with Bicester Village is knowingly engaged in criminal activity – certainly not the hundreds of sales assistants nor the managers, the brands or the company that operates the business, Value Retail Management (Bicester Village) Ltd. But neither can the authorities claim to be ignorant of what’s going on. In his book, Bullough recounts how he asked a police contact about the Chinese bargain hunters and was told: ‘A lot of them obviously just like shopping. But the rest of it is money laundering. I reckon 80 per cent of the luxury watch trade is money laundering.’ Money laundering is the method by which criminals and terrorist organisations feed their illegal income into the legal banking system. It is one of the biggest businesses in the world, accounting for up to £3.75trillion a year or 5 per cent of global GDP – equivalent to the entire economy of Germany. The phrase ‘money laundering’, familiar from thrillers and true crime documentaries, once had a literal meaning. During the 1920s, when the sale of alcohol was illegal under Prohibition law in the US, gangland boss Al Capone moved into the laundry business. He went into partnership with a man named Morris Becker in Chicago, who ran Sanitary Cleaning Shops Incorporated and was grateful for the muscle his new associate could provide. Before the invention of the home washing machine, everyone used laundries and competition was cut-throat. Becker’s rivals tried to scare off his customers by breaking into his laundry vans and splashing the clothes with acid. These intimidation tactics stopped overnight when Capone stepped in. ‘I now have the best protection in the world,’ Becker crowed. He also had a vastly increased cashflow, not only because business was now booming but because Capone channelled the cash profits from his bootleg liquor, casinos and brothels through the laundry books. He was, in every sense, cleaning up. Today, the most that a legitimate business can launder through its books is about 20 per cent of its real turnover. Anything more than that risks alerting the fraud squad in too many ways. For instance, a bar that claims to be doing £10,000 of business a night is inviting trouble if it is restocking with only £5,000-worth of booze: The taxman will notice. The staff will also have to work hard to put 100 per cent more cash through the till via fake or inflated tabs without resorting to telltale tricks such as ringing up tabs of £500 a time. Far more efficient is to set up a high street business that exists simply to declare false earnings. These ‘fronts’ pop up, do next to no real business while claiming to have supercharged turnovers, then vanish. According to the National Crime Agency (NCA), they include ‘barber shops, vape stores, mini-marts and sweet shops’. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a nationwide crackdown earlier this year, ‘to seize dirty cash and drive organised crime off our high streets and put bosses behind bars’. The police were already targeting money launderers. Last November, Operation Machinize raided 2,734 premises, making 924 arrests and seizing more than £13million of suspected criminal proceeds. But even the NCA is forced to admit that’s an insignificant amount, a mere token. By their own estimate, the high street cash laundries funnel at least £1billion through the financial system every year. And the truth is, nobody can guess at the full amount because it’s completely undocumented. It is why, in an increasingly digitised world, cold hard cash retains its allure, as even the first century Roman Emperor Vespasian recognised. Justifying the tax he imposed on public toilets, the emperor picked up a gold coin and sniffed it. ‘Pecunia non olet,’ he declared. ‘Money doesn’t stink.’