85,000 companies at one address in the UK. Is Belgium really different?
- frederic lebeau
- Jan 8
- 3 min read
When The Times (article has been removed in the meantime) revealed that more than 85,000 companies were registered at a single address on Shelton Street, London, the story quickly became symbolic.
One address. Tens of thousands of companies.
At first glance, the conclusion seems obvious: this must be a uniquely British excess.
But when you step back from the headline number and look at patterns rather than absolutes, the picture starts to look surprisingly familiar.
Why the UK looks extreme
The UK is an outlier in scale, but not in mechanics.
Creating a company in the UK is fast, cheap, and largely frictionless:
no minimum capital,
fully online incorporation,
limited upfront verification.
This model has clear economic benefits. But it also makes the system highly attractive for mass incorporation, address reuse, and short‑lived entities.
That is how you end up with numbers like 85,000 companies at a single address.
The key point, however, is not the number itself — it is what such density produces.
What density reveals
At very high address density, companies tend to display consistent structural traits:
shorter lifespans than the national average,
waves of creation and dissolution clustered in time,
limited operational footprints,
heavy reliance on intermediary infrastructure (domiciliation, nominee services, shared contacts).
This does not automatically imply fraud.
It does imply industrialisation: companies created, used, and replaced at scale.
And in Belgium?
Belgium operates under a more restrictive framework:
incorporation is slower,
involves notaries,
and comes with stronger formal requirements.
As a result, you do not see tens of thousands of companies at one address.
Across Belgium, there are addresses hosting hundreds of companies where:
company lifespans far below the national median,
repeated bursts of incorporations,
limited contactability and economic substance indicators.
Same phenomenon, different constraints
The UK did not invent the pattern — it simply pushed it to its logical extreme.
Belgium applies more friction, which compresses the numbers but does not eliminate the underlying dynamics.
The point is not that every dense address cluster is fraudulent. Most are not.
The point is that these structures dramatically lower the cost of abuse.
High‑density registration addresses — whether in the UK or Belgium — create the perfect substrate for:
Rapid company creation and disposal
Short‑lived legal entities used once and abandoned
Layering, role‑splitting and opacity across nominally distinct firms
Industrial‑scale mule networks and payment routing
Distance between economic reality and legal appearance
From isolated checks to structural awareness
Traditional fraud controls tend to look at companies one by one:
Is this company properly registered?
Are the documents valid?
Does it pass basic KYC or onboarding checks?
In dense address clusters, those questions are rarely sufficient.
What matters is not whether one company looks acceptable in isolation, but whether the surrounding structure makes abuse cheap, fast, and repeatable.
Address density, short company lifespans, synchronized creation waves and weak economic substance are risk multipliers. They describe environments where fraudulent actors can operate at scale, hide in the noise of legitimate activity, and rapidly regenerate after disruption.
This is why the Shelton Street story matters beyond the UK.
The challenge for the next generation of fraud and financial crime controls is situational awareness:
Understanding entities in context, not isolation
Detecting structural patterns, not just individual red flags
Linking weak signals across companies, addresses and time
At Datavillage, we believe that preventing fraud requires moving from static compliance checks to contextual intelligence — where patterns like these are detected early, understood collectively, and acted upon before they are exploited.
