Have you ever wondered if you’re being watched?
Nothing looks out of place.
It’s a feeling that’s creeping in for more travelers, as stories
of hidden cameras, in hotel rooms, house rentals, cruise ships,
even airplane bathrooms, continue to make headlines.
Spycams were once the stuff of international espionage,
with secret agents given cameras resembling pocket watches,
matchbooks, even tubes of lipstick.
In the movie “Meet the Parents,” Robert DeNiro’s character Jack Byrnes hides cameras
in a stuffed animal and picture frame
What’s this look like to you?
Um, this looks like a teddy bear.
Smile, you’re on nanny camera.
Which seems feasible because he’s a retired CIA agent.
Now, anyone can buy these items, either in stores or online.
But how hard is it to find these cameras?
And do devices designed to locate hidden cameras really work?
We’re going to find out.
That got me suspicious.
We asked a Singapore tech company, OMG Solutions, to hide cameras in three rooms in this house.
Then we sent in my colleague, Victor, to see how many he could find
Wow, this looks like any other room.
First with the naked eye, and then with the help of four different types of camera detectors.
Here’s what we uncovered.
First, Victor went room-to-room,
closely examining the master bedroom, inspecting bunkbeds in a child’s room.
What clues should I look for?
And scrutinizing household items in the home office.
He spent a lot of time at the book case, and walked away.
I know that there are hidden cameras, but I can’t seem to locate them. It is really disconcerting.
So far, he said he’s found nothing suspicious.
Yeah.
After 20 minutes of searching, he found one camera located inside a working clock.
Wait, alarm clock? Is the time correct? So this alarm clock, the time is wrong.
Where is the lens? Oh! Oh! I found one! Oh my god, I saw it!
The time was wrong, which tipped him off.
He found one!
At the six o’clock, you can see it! Oh my god, it’s... not bad.
But what gave it away was the time. I found one, yes! But it’s so well camouflaged.
But Victor wasn’t pleased with this result, feeling he probably missed a spycam or two.
But what he doesn’t know is that he missed 26 out of 27 hidden cameras in the house.
This didn’t surprise Pieter Tjia, founder of OMG Solutions.
He’s touching the camera, but he might not be able to tell that it’s a camera.
He said in the past three years, cameras have become smaller and harder to see,
often hidden in everyday objects, such as calculators, diffusers, and water bottles.
Like a pinhole camera, it’s embedded into the object.
But it wasn’t always this way.
When video cameras hit the mass market in the 1980s,
they were designed to rest on the operator’s shoulder.
Later models could be operated with just one hand.
Today, most people carry video cameras with them most of the time.
But while spycams are much smaller, they’re just as easy to buy and operate.
Back at the house, we asked Victor to download a popular app called Fing,
which scans Wi-Fi networks for cameras.
Searching hidden cameras, I can see...
The app, what it does is, it details whether or not
something is connected to the wireless network.
It says that there are 22 active devices but found no cameras.
None of the cameras are connected.
And the app doesn’t like tell me exactly where and what to look out for.
I don’t know where are they, it’s not solving my problem.
He also used his phone’s flashlight to search, a common tip suggested online.
Anything here? Oh wait!
Wait... Is this a hidden camera? Now I’m paranoid.
I mean, the fact of the matter is,
to find these cameras you would have to pick up every single object in the room.
I don’t see anything here...
Inspect it
Yep, correct, correct.
Every angle, and then even still, you may miss it.
This search, aided by the flashlight, located another three cameras, in a Wi-Fi repeater
Sound bar... nothing. Wi-fi repeater, nothing...
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There’s a camera over here.
I thought this was a Wi-fi repeater, but it’s not. I see a camera over here. Found it.
A button on a shirt.
Oh wait, I found one. I was looking at this hanger next to the mirror,
as I made my way down to the buttons, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve seen a
movie where a hidden camera was embedded in the button.
So I was looking at the first button, second button, third button!
Then that’s where it gave it away, the button is different from the rest of the buttons.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a 4K camera, which has a livestreaming function.
If you’re not observant, you would not have noticed it.
And a teddy bear, the last one Victor noticed because
of the unusual grammar on the bear’s shirt.
Wait, there’s something in the bear.
The bear has this badge that says, “With happiness, every time and pleasure”.
So it’s not grammatically correct.
There’s a hole in the eye?! Oh, there’s the camera!
So I found 3 cameras so far... 1, 2, 3. Cool.
With Victor’s frustration rising,
it was time to turn to hand-held devices designed to locate hidden cameras.
This is a radio frequency detector. It beeps when it’s close to a camera.
But it only works if a camera is turned on and connected to Wi-Fi,
which means it won’t find cameras that use SD cards to store data.
It’s also prone to false alarms.
It’s almost like you’re distracted with that sound.
Yes.
Yeah, he’s gonna be annoyed with this one.
There’s a lot of false alarms, which is actually making my job harder than it should be.
This device also has a built-in lens detector,
but the beeping proved so distracting, Victor didn’t locate a single camera with this device.
Victor: You need to constantly tune it to the right frequency to pick it up.
The area which has no camera at all, you can hear this [device] beeping.
You see?!
The technology in these cameras has become increasingly user-friendly,
but this is not the only reason for the growing number of spycam cases.
But unlike the peeping Toms of the past, these voyeurs stand to make a profit.
A man in China, who secretly recorded women in hotel rooms,
sold the videos to a porn site for $28 each.
In total, he pocketed $85,000 before he was arrested in 2018,
and later sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In 2019, 300 spycams recorded more than 100,000 videos of hotel guests
in Jining, China, which voyeurs paid between 100 to 300 Chinese yuan to access.
That same year, police in Seoul, South Korea arrested two men for
livestreaming videos of 1,600 people hidden in 30 hotels across 10 cities.
The pair streamed the videos to a website that charged monthly subscriptions.
But there’s another way criminals extract money from these videos,
by extorting the people they record.
In 2018, a woman sued a Hampton Inn in Albany, New York when videos of
her showering were posted on porn sites and sent to her friends and colleagues.
The perpetrator, thought to be a hotel employee,
published the videos online after she failed to send him money and additional videos.
Similar extortion plots have been uncovered in India, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.
With just two more tests to go, we give Victor a basic lens detector.
These are cheap, portable and easy to use. When the device finds a lens, a red dot lights up.
Oh wait, I found. Wait... There you go, the 3-hour mark. It’s quite obvious actually.
The problem? You must be close to the camera to find it.
Oh yes, so you need to be very close.
You said to him he needs to get up close, but now he’s realizing just how close.
How close, yes you’re right.
When you’re traveling, you’re already exhausted.
The last thing you want to do is spend one hour
scrutinizing every nook and cranny just to locate a camera.
Despite its popularity on social media, Victor only found two cameras with this device.
In our final search, we gave Victor another lens detector, this one much more advanced.
If you see the red dot [and] when you move down, you don’t see the red dot anymore,
when you put [the device] back up and see the red dot, then that’s the lens.
Oh wow!
With this detector, Victor found 11 more cameras, in this tissue box, this bag,
and a tiny pinhole camera buried between these files on the floor.
12?! And I only found 1 camera, 2 cameras. And I was so proud of myself.
In total, Victor found 17 out of 27 cameras.
There’s a camera in this storage box.
Not a bad result, but not a great one either.
Okay, it blended in very well and you never suspected this one, the speaker.
Yes, the speaker is the camera.
Okay.
Social media posts about hidden cameras have increased nearly 400% in the past two years,
according to the data company Sprout Social,
with countless articles dedicated to finding a quick and easy solution to this growing problem.
But there isn’t one, at least not yet.
And while devices to detect cameras are advancing,
so are the cameras that are being hidden, sometimes in plain sight.