Our family installed a video security system
in our home this past July.
So when I work away from home, I like to see my family.
If they're in the kitchen.
And I'd say something to them
and I thought that was pretty cool.
On September 19th of this year,
I was upstairs in my shop
and I heard my little girl go, Daddy, Daddy, is that you?
I sat right here and then the cameras just went on.
What did you hear?
They started to say my name and your name.
I walked down my stairs
and I saw my daughter sitting on the couch
and I could hear the cameras going off.
There was more than one voice
so they would speak in French,
and then go back and speak to my daughter.
We know your daddy's not home, go get Brooklyn.
A sheer panic went over me
and that's when I called by husband.
When Brooklyn called me
and told me that we were getting hacked, my heart dropped.
So I immediately told her to hang up the phone, to dial 911.
911 told me to grab my children and get out of the house.
We ran out the front door
and they started talking through the doorbell.
Come back inside, where are you?
I had my one-year-old in my arm
and my eight-year-old in between my legs crying.
The police came, the cameras went off again,
and you said, oh, Mrs. Texas, you called the police on us.
The police said, who are you?
And all of the voices in all of the cameras started laughing
and it was the scariest day of my life.
She thought it was the scariest day of her life
but just two weeks later, the nightmare got worse
when the hacker contacted Brooklyn on social media.
About two weeks after that initial attack,
I received a message on a social media platform
and it said, Brooklyn, I wanna ask you a question.
I told my wife to ahead and answer it
and they admitted that they were the hackers.
They started saying, we just wanted to let you know
that your password had been stolen.
And I said, okay, I get your point,
you scared us, find a new hobby.
As soon as I sent that message, things turned for the worse.
He said, since you would like to act like a little (beep),
now we're entering into phase two.
We are now gonna be taking action against you.
Let's see the cops stop what they can't see.
A few minutes later, I received a phone call.
There was a voice message that was left.
Make sure to tell Brooklyn that she's dead.
I heard it over and over again.
It said, make sure to tell Brooklyn that she's dead.
Make sure to tell Brooklyn that she's dead.
Everything got very real.
I was afraid that there was somebody truly after my wife.
This wasn't a silly person hacking into a camera system.
This was someone that was out to get me.
I was terrified.
Until it's happened to you,
it is hard to imagine how real this gets, isn't it?
Absolutely.
You don't think that anything like this
would ever happen to you or your family.
You see it in movies, you see it with celebrities,
but not just a normal mama.
This is not like Hollywood or New York City or whatever.
Suburbia. Yeah,
and so you don't expect, how do I get found there?
But you say the hacker spoke to your daughter
whenever she got home from school.
How did that happen?
She comes in from school, goes upstairs,
says hello to me, I was in my shop working.
Walks downstairs and not five minutes later,
the cameras started beeping and I know the beeping noise
because my husband would beep in
and go, hi, how are you, how's school?
If he's not home.
But I heard men's voices
and I heard my daughter going,
daddy, is that you, is that you?
And I walked down the stairs
and she's sitting on the couch in camera view
and I hid behind the wall
because I immediately got terrified.
My heart sunk in my chest.
I heard these voices, they were yelling in French.
And they were saying her name
and they were telling her, go get Brooklyn.
And I knew then that something wasn't right.
You now know that they know who you are,
what your business is, where you live.
They know everything
about you. Children's names, yeah.
And that's what you say, you didn't know how
to protect against this, right?
Correct, no. 'Cause what do you do?
You can't go slap at the air.
What do you do?
I felt very powerless.
My heart dropped, like I got this cold feeling over myself.
And that's when I told her she had to hang up and dial 911.
And so because they knew where y'all live
and had so much information on you,
you don't know whether it's safer to stay inside your home
where they have access
or whether you can let your daughter go to school.
Are they gonna show up not in the virtual world
but in the real world?