Busi­ness own­ers at Bam­boo No 2 say they will be mov­ing to lock down the area af­ter cer­tain hours by es­tab­lish­ing a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty to pro­tect them­selves from ex­tor­tion­ists and oth­er crim­i­nals.

Fear has gripped the com­mu­ni­ty fol­low­ing in­ci­dents in­volv­ing at least three busi­ness own­ers who re­ceived threats–one via phone and the oth­ers through writ­ten notes dropped off at their busi­ness places.

Ac­cord­ing to the busi­ness own­ers, the ex­tor­tion­ists are de­mand­ing month­ly pay­ments ex­ceed­ing $100,000.

The dis­tress­ing sit­u­a­tion be­gan two weeks ago when an uniden­ti­fied caller threat­ened a busi­ness­man, telling him he or his fam­i­ly would be harmed, or his busi­ness would be de­stroyed by fire, if he did not pay the ‘tax’. Sub­se­quent­ly, two oth­er busi­ness­men found notes slipped un­der their doors de­mand­ing mon­ey in ex­change for pro­tec­tion.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia, busi­ness­man and com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist In­shan Ish­mael said crime had es­ca­lat­ed in the Bam­boo area and ex­tor­tion is now a grow­ing con­cern.

“It is not for $5,000 and $50,000, it’s lit­er­al­ly for hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars and they are threats to kill, they are threats to burn down places if they don’t pay or if they go to the po­lice.”

He added, “We’re go­ing to lock down Bam­boo af­ter hours. Bam­boo is go­ing to be a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty and we’re not go­ing to ask any­body for ap­proval. This is go­ing to be done be­cause this is to safe­guard us and to safe­guard our fam­i­lies. Some­thing must be done be­cause the po­lice are just not do­ing what they’re sup­posed to do.”

He said Bam­boo No 2 busi­ness­men nev­er had to deal with such is­sues be­fore.

“In times past, we have had rob­beries and even we have had our Imam be­ing tar­get­ed et cetera. It is now go­ing to a whole new lev­el and these are the same busi­ness­es that turn around some­times when it comes to many of these peo­ple who are the same crim­i­nals, their friends, their fam­i­lies, their what­ev­er ... they would come and they would get a dis­count on their car parts,” he said.

“I mean, it is shock­ing that they are ac­tu­al­ly bit­ing the hand that is feed­ing them. So noth­ing, noth­ing is be­ing done be­cause in all the cas­es so far, we have not heard of cy­ber­crime get­ting in­volved and catch­ing any­one. So there­fore, every­one is at a loss be­cause if there are de­mands to pay, some­body has to be col­lect­ing, some­body has to be re­ceiv­ing be­cause the crim­i­nal does not say here is our wire trans­fer in­for­ma­tion, it has to be done with cash. Why is the po­lice not set­tling up stings?”

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that some busi­ness­men are con­sid­er­ing leav­ing the coun­try while oth­ers are ex­plor­ing the op­tion of run­ning their busi­ness­es re­mote­ly.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, head of the North Cen­tral Po­lice Di­vi­sion, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Richard Smith, said no re­ports of ex­tor­tion had been made by any of the busi­ness own­ers from the Bam­boo No 2 com­mu­ni­ty.

How­ev­er, he stat­ed, “Any­body who comes to you de­mand­ing mon­ey ... In oth­er words, they call it tax­ing, any­body who comes to tax you please come and re­port it to the po­lice, we will charge them, we will do our in­ves­ti­ga­tions and pro­ceed against them ... we can­not al­low this to con­tin­ue.”