They make great information extractors, say owners of detective agencies
BENGALURU: Lynx Detective Agency, a third generation detective agency based in Bengaluru, gets at least 10 to 15 applications from women who want to work as detectives, every month.
“We currently have five women detectives working with us. We trained them for six months and during this time, they started taking on cases,” says Nikhil, the owner. These women detectives are frequently hired as they are adept at tackling cases that involve pre-marital fact checking. “These cases have been on the rise over the past three years. It’s almost a fashion statement now for a family to get young men and women completely checked out before they go ahead with the proposals,” he says.
According to Nikhil, women detectives have the upper hand as they are easily trusted and can get information easily. “People are more likely to give out personal and other information to women than to men,” he says.
Best Detectives agency, based out of Hyderabad, with one of their branches in Bengaluru, has a network of 50 detectives across the country, out of which around 10 are women. “Mostly, women detectives are great for pre-matrimonial investigation, where families want their prospective grooms or brides checked out,” says Kasa Venugopal, owner, Best Detectives. He agrees that women make great information extractors.
When Nisha (name changed), a 29-year-old private detective, was given her first case, she was very nervous. She was asked to trail a bank manager, on the request of his wife, who thought he was cheating on her. “It turned out that she was indeed right. It took me two weeks to close the case,” she says.
Nisha decided to turn sleuth when her first job, as a call centre executive, started to turn boring. “I was looking through classifieds online when I saw that a number of detective agencies in the city were hiring. It took me back to the days when I used to read Nancy Drew books as a child and I thought, why not? This was three years ago,” she says.
Most of her cases revolve around marital cases. “Apart from that, I do some corporate snooping, which basically involves getting information about one company for it’s competitor,” she says.
When asked if she requires gadgets to do her job she says a handy notebook, a camera and a smart phone are usually more than sufficient.
“My parents were not too happy at first because they thought I was unnecessarily putting myself in danger. But after many long conversations and a few months after I started working as a detective, their fears were put to rest,” she says.
At Globe Detective Agency, which been around in the city for 53 years, women detectives are hired to work on cases that involve other women. “These are mostly infidelity cases, fraud cases, post-matrimonial cases, parents checking up on their daughters, and more,” says Puneet Kumar, director of the agency. Puneet says the drug problem in Bengaluru has become rampant and young college girls are the most affected. “Then there’s the issue of prostitution. A lot of young girls spend a few hours a week at these illegal massage parlours,” he says.
Sarita (name changed), 44 years of age, has been working at Globe Detective agency for 20 years now.
“Ever since I was a child I wanted to become a detective. I used to watch detective serials and reads books and obsess over these characters. I haven’t done any other job apart from this,” she says.
One of her most recent cases involved a college girl who had secretly stopped attending classes to peddle drugs. “We use the social media quite extensively to track people, as a lot of them are quite active on most of them. We befriend them on social networks and start getting information from them,” she says.
For Sarita, becoming a private detective is all about intelligence and street-smarts. “As long as you are intelligent and can think on your feet, you can become a detective,” she says.