The wedding scanners
Among the list of very important service providers required for a wedding, you have the caterer, the florist and now... detectives
It was a match made in heaven… in the skies actually. He was a frequent flyer and she an airhostess. He would admire her from the first class and she would try to make airline food that bit more special. The folks were happy, friends congratulated the pair and everything seemed perfect.
Until a background check revealed that the man already had a wife, two kids and a history of credit card fraud. This plane had to land.
Then there was the case of a husband finding women’s underwear tucked away in the cupboard. Strange, because the garment wasn’t the wife’s and even stranger was the fact that she turned hostile. Shocked, the man ‘ordered a tail’ on his wife (of just four months) and soon uncovered a lesbian affair that had been on since college. And what’s a tail you might ask. Well, that term is part of a special kind of service that’s fast-emerging in the city. For detective agencies nationwide, Hyderabad is the second largest market for pre- and post-wedding background checks. The city has become so important, that, several firms have opened branch offices here. “After Delhi, Hyderabad is the big one…,” reveals Rahul Rai, a senior associate with Veteran Investigation Services. Hyderabad pays more for ‘quality services’ and we rarely get requests for rate negotiations, he says. So, what are the kind of calls coming in? “There’s been a rise in the number of men calling, asking for background checks on wives or girlfriends,” Rai reveals. “Recently, an industrialist from Hyderabad hired us to gather evidence against his son-in-law, who was suspected to be a bisexual... turned out he was. But why? Why go to the extent of placing bugs and family members under 24hour surveillance? A sleuth, who refused to be identified, explains, “We keep it very quiet. For influential families, worried about reputations, we offer an ideal
way out of sticky situations.”