caught by webcam

[Serge914]

A house burglar was caught after a webcam on the owner's computer recorded images of him carrying out the raid.

Link

That is a great idea

[Saintly]

I set up a simular thing about 4 years ago at my mums house after she got burgled twice within 6 months. i put 3 web cams in the house (2 in the main two rooms and 1 pointing to the drive way). they where removed from the cases and placed above and behind the alarm sensors so they are not really noticable. the one on the driveway is mounted with the motion light sensor and can get numberplates or car descriptions.
They are all connected to an oldish PC in the roof that is connected to power via a relay that is connected to the alarm siren wires. so if the alarm goes off the PC does a short bootup and starts capturing immages (cam1, cam2, cam3, cam1, cam2, etc). it continues doing this till it fills the second hard disk (40Gb - about a day) or when i stop it.
Havn't had another breakin yet so no live tests.

[RickM]

Great Idea.

I was thinking that a cheap motion detector/webcam combo and cheap wireless router would make this very easy to do. The wireless capability allows one to hide the laptop or PC from the intruder very easily.

[motion]

This is all you need:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=297

[RickM]

That is cool....perhaps a bit obvious though. I'd probably opt for a pinhole or lipstick camera.

[Les Paul]

What I'm wondering is if the bad guy knows the camera is there will they still rip stuff off? So would a camera be a deterrent? Or would a hidden camera be better because they might be more careless in diguising themselves?

[RickM]

Either way if the video is being streamed to a website they're cooked. Maybe some audio over a speaker stating "A video of your activities is being sent to the police via the internet" will scare them...

[Owain]

Originally posted by motion
This is all you need:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=297

That's what I'm looking for. I've looked at several different wireless cameras but so far have found them all a little large. This one looks like it will fit in my inteded enclosure perfectly.

I'm going to put something like this up in my building's parking garage, looking at my parking space. I just have to find a way to get power to it; I'm not too keen on changing batteries every week.

When my car was stolen the cameras in my building picked the thieves up waking in the front door (tailgating), going down to the garage, and driving up the ramp in my car. The police said "do you have pictures of them breaking into the car?" Of course, there were no cameras pointed that way, so, no. Next time (hopefully there won't be a next time, but if there is) the answer will be different.