We tested five ways to find hidden cameras in hotels and house rentals
Summary
TLDRAs spy cameras become smaller and more affordable, hidden cameras in hotels, rental homes and other spaces are a growing concern. Tests showed an untrained person missed most hidden cameras by just looking around. Apps and basic detectors found some cameras, but advanced devices were needed to uncover many cleverly hidden ones. Extortion and voyeur sites profiting off private videos are rising globally too. While detectors are improving, hidden cameras are getting harder to find, leaving travelers unable to find quick, foolproof solutions.
Takeaways
- 😲 Hidden cameras are increasingly being used to spy on unsuspecting people in hotels, rentals, planes etc.
- 🕵️♂️ Spycams were once used mainly by spies but are now easily available to anyone.
- 🔍 Finding hidden cameras is very difficult even when actively looking for them.
- 📷 Cameras today are much smaller and harder to spot than older models.
- 💰 Voyeurs can profit by selling or livestreaming videos, or through extortion.
- 🛏 Hotels and rentals are common locations for hidden cameras.
- 📱 Apps and devices designed to find spycams have limitations.
- 👁️ You need to be very close to a spycam for basic lens detectors to work.
- 📈 Social media posts about hidden cameras have increased 400% in 2 years.
- 🚫 There is no quick and easy solution yet to find all hidden cameras.
Q & A
How many cameras were hidden in the house for the test?
-OMG Solutions hid 27 cameras in 3 rooms of the test house.
What tipped Victor off to the clock radio camera?
-The time displayed on the clock radio was wrong, which made Victor suspicious that it might contain a hidden camera.
How many cameras did Victor initially find just by visual inspection?
-Victor only found 1 out of the 27 hidden cameras just by looking around the rooms.
What smartphone app did Victor use to try to detect cameras?
-Victor used a Wi-Fi scanning app called Fing to try to detect hidden cameras connected to the wireless network.
Why didn't the radio frequency detector locate any cameras?
-The radio frequency detector only finds cameras that are turned on and connected to Wi-Fi. Many of the hidden cameras were using SD cards to store data locally.
How are some criminals exploiting spycam videos?
-Some criminals record private videos using spycams and then extort money from the people in the videos by threatening to post them online.
What type of lens detector helped Victor find the most cameras?
-An advanced lens detector that displays a red dot when pointed at a camera lens helped Victor find 11 additional hidden cameras.
How many cameras did Victor ultimately find?
-In total, Victor found 17 out of the 27 hidden cameras.
Why is finding hidden cameras difficult?
-Cameras are being made smaller and can be easily hidden in everyday objects. Thoroughly checking an entire room is exhausting and time-consuming.
Are there any foolproof solutions for finding spycams?
-No, there is no quick and easy way to reliably detect all hidden cameras as the technology continues to advance.
Outlines
🕵️ Hidden Cameras Are Increasingly Common in Travel Spots
Paragraph 1 discusses how hidden cameras are becoming more prevalent in places like hotels, rentals, ships, and bathrooms. These used to be limited to espionage but now cheap spycams are easy to buy. To test their prevalence, cameras were hidden in a house and a colleague tried finding them.
😟 Most Hidden Cameras Go Undetected Despite Trying Many Discovery Methods
Paragraph 2 continues the hidden camera test narrative. Despite a long visual search, only 4 out of 27 cameras were found. Apps and RF detectors also performed poorly. More advanced lens detectors located more cameras but still missed many concealed ones.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Spycam
💡Voyeur
💡Extortion
💡Detector
💡Lens
💡Wi-Fi
💡Livestreaming
💡Encryption
💡Peeping Tom
💡Pinhole camera
Highlights
Stories of hidden cameras in hotel rooms, rentals, ships, and bathrooms make headlines
Secret agents once hid cameras in watches, matchbooks, and lipstick tubes
Cameras are now smaller, often hidden in everyday objects like water bottles
Victor found only 1 out of 27 hidden cameras by eye in 20 minutes
A Wi-Fi scanning app found devices but no hidden cameras
A radio frequency detector distracted more than helped locate cameras
Voyeurs sell secretly filmed hotel videos for profit up to $85,000
Extortion plots uncover hotel hidden camera schemes globally
A basic lens detector found only 2 out of 27 cameras
An advanced lens detector located 11 more hidden cameras
In total, 17 out of 27 hidden cameras were found
Finding hidden cameras takes exhaustive, close inspection
As detectors advance, so do well-disguised hidden cameras
Online posts about spycams increased 400% in 2 years
There's no quick, failsafe way to find hidden cameras yet
Transcripts
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.
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