I’m probably going to get flamed for being stupid but I’ve genuinely no idea what to do.
We moved into our new house (privately rented) 3 months ago.
On moving in, I noticed all of the doors had alarm sensors to them (even inside doors) and locks that had clearly been torn off by the landlord (who previously lived here as their family home) also security lights outside that are totally cut and not functional. There is also an alarm system, that again the landlord has torn out and it doesn’t work. It’s all really strange because it looks as though A LOT of effort went into securing the house and I can only assume they had a break in at some point to warrant this extreme level of security. Also, DH and I have no idea why the LL would have then chosen to tear out all of the alarm fittings before we moved in. Super weird!
We aren’t in contact with the LL as it’s rented through an agency so we can’t ask them directly.
Anyway, in the past month stranger things have began happening.
Its an enclosed, gated property and last week our neighbour came over and said she had found a torn open Amazon parcel with my name on it on the road. So someone had taken it from our front porch whilst we were both at work and torn it open. Not a massive red flag - there are shady people around and it’s a common occurrence. I simply asked Amazon to only deliver to safe lockers from now on.
A week later, we decided to put our (very large) above ground pool up for the kids. We have outdoor plug sockets that are weather protected and DH runs a heater from them to heat the pool. One morning we woke up and the plug for the heater had totally been torn out of the wall (someone would have had to remove the casing around it to do this. It wasn’t an accident!) and the actual heater was knocked over.
early hours of this morning I woke up and noticed our front gates wide open and my dog was barking like crazy. DH checked the property and couldn’t find anything or anyone, he did however find that a few items he had left on the front garden had been displaced but DH being DH simply put it down to (none existent) wind.
i have set up CCTV cameras but the wifi in our home isn’t strong enough for them to constantly pick up motion detections and when we wake up the next morning, half of the night has usually gone missing on them due to the camera losing signal. (It’s a big house and the cameras are quite far away from the main WiFi box) I have bought a wifi extender today to see if this helps. We can’t really afford an expensive CCTV system that doesn’t run off of WiFi.
I have contacted the letting agency today to ask if there have been any prior break ins and could they ask the LL and they told me they’d get back to me but the LL is currently on holiday.
is there anything else we can do? Obviously I don’t feel I can just contact the police at this stage declaring my pool heater was unplugged and one of my Amazon parcels was stolen and opened because I’d sound mental.
The back gate is padlocked, however this clearly didn’t stop the pool heater being meddled with. Our house is a corner property with fencing around it so I assume someone COULD in theory jump over one of the fenced sides without ever having to go down our drive and through the back gate.
Its a very quiet area and I just don’t understand what could be going on.
AIBU to be freaked out by this??
thanks.