Zak Garner-Purkis investigated London’s American Candy shops (Image: Daily Express)

“Don’t f***king film me,” he continued to shout, twisting his body in an attempt to try and face him down.

We thought this place might have a problem with journalists showing up, but even then, the level of aggression was fiercer than I expected.

Officers searching the premises discovered that the door to a secret underground passage was hidden behind a wall of t-shirts. The tunnel was stashed with thousands of allegedly counterfeit goods with a street value of over £80,000.

But the first sign of our camera and mention of the man’s name sent the shop worker behind the till into a frenzy.

Eventually, a calmer colleague stepped in and claimed the director still linked to the address had disappeared. The landlord, he claimed, was even trying to find him.

What he didn’t have an answer to was the broader question we’d come to Oxford Street to find out: why do so many business on the UK’s prime retail destination keep going bust and popping up again?

Our team were shocked by the aggression from one American candy shop worker in London (Image: Daily Express)

Several investigations have suggested the pattern is linked to tax avoidance, with a whopping £9m lost in business rates alone, Westminster Council reported back in 2023.

Three years later, our experience on Oxford Street does little to contradict the idea that business in these establishments is being done in bad faith.

We found, on the lower end of the scale, constantly absent and somehow always unnamed managers, that staff deferred to for all of our questions. These retail leaders were not only perennially off-site, they were also overseen by even more anonymous owners.

This lack of transparency isn’t just about avoiding customer accountability; it’s a strategy to obscure ownership and evade tax obligations.

Employees claimed either not to know or simply refused to say who the proprietors of these places were and in several of the shops the official company name, which legally must be on display for the general public, was not visible.

It’s almost like they deliberately didn’t want people to know who was behind the operation.

The most ludicrous explanation a shop came up for not letting customers see who they were actually doing business with was in Harry Potter-themed shop Wizards and Spells.

There appeared to be magic at work on the piece of paper with the company name that had apparently been pinned to the wall because when I challenged an employee about why it wasn’t on display he said it had fallen off the wall, into a cellophane folder and leapt into a closed drawer a metre or so from where it had been.

The absurdity of that encounter was just a precursor to the real aggression we faced elsewhere.

The videographer and I were merely walking past with our equipment when the two men loitering in the store started giving us eyeballs in an attempt to intimidate.

I immediately found this suspicious and decided to go ask why they were acting this way. As we headed round the corner to set up, one of the men followed us and appeared to film us on his phone.

He ran back into the store and, as we approached, saw him changing into a security vest. After initially letting us walk in he became very aggressive in our question about who owned the business. He started thrusting his phone in our faces saying he would “find us” and that the footage was for his unnamed ‘boss.’

His ID card had been turned the other way and when I challenged him about this, the man claimed he didn’t need to show it because I wasn’t a representative of the Security Industry Association.

The law states that licensed security staff must display their credentials at all times except in exceptional circumstances (like being undercover). It was clear the man and the business had something to hide.

And he was far from alone. As we worked our way down the road we found similar behaviour across the board. We were met with threats, insults and attempts at intimidation.

But business owners and staff tend to be conscious of the environment and the impact coming across as a violent thug might have on a potential customer.

So what does it say that those working on London’s most famous street showed no concern for behaving in such a way?

I think it shows knock-off goods and tax evasion is just the start and that we’ve got a very serious problem.

The fear is that, if we can’t tackle it here in the capital’s prime retail destination, what hope do we have of being able to smash it across the rest of the country.