Two men, posing as horticulture department officials, have been visiting the homes of senior citizens in and around Lavelle Road on the pretext of treating their plants and trees.
The men first visited Sunil Pichamuthu’s parents house on Hayes Road, off Residency Road. “They claimed that they would treat the trees so they could grow better,” he told Metrolife.
The men proceeded to inject a sapota (chikoo) tree with a liquid and dropped some pellets around the trunk.
“They charged them Rs 2,200. My parents did not have a choice but to pay them,” he said. Soon, Pichamuthu sent out alerts on neighbourhood WhatsApp groups.
The two men dropped into an elderly woman’s apartment the same day. “Clearly they had scanned the building and targeted the house with the most number of plants in the balcony,” said Marianne De Nazareth, one of the owners of the apartment complex, Pilerne, on Hayes Road.
Security concerns
The tenant, in her 70s, was home alone as her son and granddaughter were away at work. “Luckily, I had just seen the alert on a WhatsApp gardening group. To my shock I found that they had entered the woman’s house. I directed the security to chase them away,” she said.
Since the incident, the apartment has tightened security in the building. “But it is challenging, thanks to a continuous stream of delivery executives,” she told Metrolife.
In Victoria Layout, the men visited Sanjay Xavier’s neighbour’s house. “The homeowner is a single lady in her mid 70s and lives alone. They claimed they are from the horticulture department and injected something into the trees on her property,” he says.
The two men returned to her house the next day, but she had seen the WhatsApp alert, and they made a quick exit when she told them she would call the police.
While some bought the gardening story, others were more sceptical. Satish Mokshagundam, who lives on Museum Road, was visited by one of the men. He shooed him away when he offered to ‘treat his coconut trees’.
“I told him I was not interested in his services. I was on guard because I had seen the alerts on the WhatsApp groups. Policemen from the Cubbon Park station came by the same evening on receiving calls from worried residents,” he says.
The Cubbon Park police told Metrolife they had not received any formal complaint.
Prema Sarathy, a resident of Lavelle Road, was also visited by only one of the men. “It was sometime between 10.30 am and 11 am. My husband was upstairs. This man said he was from Lalbagh. He told me he would look after my plants and that my rose bushes don’t look very healthy,” she recalls. Finding it suspicious, she told him to leave. It was only later that she saw the alert on the Lavelle Road residents’ WhatsApp group.
A representative of the horticulture department clarified that no such programme is being conducted. “This is clearly a scam,” he says.