It's a scary prospect... but it does happen and in varying levels of violence.

We know about the lesser end of a home invasion from bitter experience when we left our 17 year old daughter home alone for the weekend. Well, actually, we didn't. She told us she was going to a party and didn't want to accompany us on a family trip away. What we didn't realise was that the party was going to be at our house... and that notification of this event had appeared on MySpace - a social networking site.

Unbeknown to us, within an hour of the notice going up, a crowd of young people had assembled in the street outside our house looking to get in to the party. Because there were people smoking and drinking, my daughter had opened the windows in the front room. When refused entrance by the front door, the teenagers then attempted to climb through the windows.

Home Invasion By Rent A Mob

They also scaled the back gate and rampaged through the garden to gain access via the backdoor. Like a swarm of locusts, they spread through the house, invading our home and stealing anything they could consume easily - advent calendar chocolates, crisps and alcohol. They also left cigarette burns and caustic marks from beer cans in precious furniture and even the acrylic bath!

Someone also tried to set fire to a poster they didn't like on a bedroom door.

At this point there were two calls to the police - one from our confused neighbours who could see the fracas and the fact that there were no cars on the drive but not sure of what to do because we had not alerted them to the fact that we were away - and another from a concerned guest, recognising that things were getting out of hand.

When the police arrived, they shepherded the crowd in the street in the direction of the railway station and, when they returned to hoover up the rest, they had departed of their own accord.

My daughter and her friends set about trying to put right the damage - there were noodles everywhere, from the ceiling to behind the furniture where they had taken packets from the cupboards and thrown the contents around. And mud from the garden trampled throughout the house.

We were lucky because our house was the first. Rent-a-mob visited three other homes after ours, getting progressively more drunk and unpredictable as they went and leaving a trail of destruction in those properties.

The drama made the local newspaper and it was an extremely frightening event for our daughter, who learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of posting on social media platforms.

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