How gangs are turning middle-class landlords' houses into cannabis farms. They use fake IDs to con agencies, then rip down walls and dump tons of soil in every room. And victims say that's not even th

It wasn’t until he found 10 tons of soil on a bedroom floor that Charles Reeves, 57, realised that the tenants in his £3million London home had turned it into a cannabis farm. Charles Reeves, 57, found 10 tons of soil on a bedroom floor in his £3million London home His neighbours told him that they had seen men acting suspiciously at the property And Melanie Ralph, living and working in Singapore with her family, couldn’t believe that the wealthy entrepreneur who rented her £1.6million oast house in Kent for £3,200 a month was really a cannabis grower who went on to cause £75,000 worth of damage. ‘Cannabis farms are being uncovered with depressing regularity in the UK and, where once they were generally in large scale industrial units, remote warehouses and disused farm buildings, the police are increasingly finding smaller-scale cannabis farms in residential rental properties on unremarkable suburban streets,’ says Suzy Hershman, head of dispute adjudication at MyDeposits, the government-authorised tenancy deposit protection provider. Melanie Ralph rented out her £1.6million house in Kent for £3,200 a month to what she thought was a wealthy entrepreneur The cannabis grower caused £75,000 worth of damage to Melanie's award-winning oast house, designed by her father-in-law, architect George Ralph, in the 1980s ‘I stepped in and the first thing I noticed was all this heat and lots of loud fans all over the house,’ he says. The house that was ours has been taken away for ever.’ Charles says he wishes he had made his own credit checks on his ‘tenant’, rather than relying on a letting agent that turned out to be bogus, but he was in New York and the previous tenancy had run smoothly; he had no reason to suspect the next one wouldn’t.