Criminals beware, Over Hulton residents have a secret weapon which will stop you in your tracks.

The simple use of Whatsapp is helping to keeping residents in Over Hulton safe from criminals.

The area has around 1,500 homes.

And around 1,100 residents have joined a Whatsapp Group where incidents are reported before criminals can even get started.

The Over Hulton Information Outlet is split into eight different groups and is even used by police in the area.

It came in handy earlier this week when a suspected con artist went round knocking on doors.

But thanks to the rapid spreading of messages through the Whatsapp Groups they were quickly ignored.

John Bullen, a member of the Over Hulton Community Group, said the new crime fighting tool had been transformational.

He said: “Before we started this which would be three years ago we would be getting three to four crime reports every week.

“Now in the last eight months we have reported two to three crimes.

“Over the last 12 months crime has halved.”

He gave an example of how the area is fighting crime.

He said: “We had a police surgery on Monday where everyone can talk to our police officers.

“We had one lady complaining about parking on our main road.

“You could say that is because people aren’t interested, but the way I see it is there isn’t anything to report.

“It is the best crime prevention tool I have seen in my time in the community group and that is 15 years.”

He gave an example from the early days of how the group led to arrests.

He said: “Somebody saw on CCTV two young blokes were looking in car windows at 2am.

“Other people in the same street also saw it.

“Our police officers, because they are in the group, looked into it.

“They got CCTV and they recognised them.

“They got gone and we had them taken off the street.

“On their own nobody would have reported it but vehicle interference is a crime.”