A while ago I bought some wireless security cameras for our home. Two of them. One to point out of the office window where you can see the drive and one to point out of the top bedroom window covering the front garden, drive and street. After a few months of them being in place, they finally paid off. The footage from the CCTV camera helped a situation that came up.
What Cameras?
These are the cameras I bought. Fairly cheap and from Amazon. You can pay a monthly subscription for the footage to go to the cloud. All I do though is pop a micro SD card in and if I need to access the footage, it records to it and then rewrites when it runs out of space. There is also an app you can download to your phone. It lets you set the cameras up, position them, set up the blank zones to avoid if there are cars going past so they don’t trigger the cameras and all that kind of thing. It also lets you watch back the footage and record clips or take photos to your phone.
So What Happened?
I’ve previously watched footage back if we’ve had a card pushed through the door but we weren’t 100% sure who it was from. I also record a clip of a car driving too fast down our road which resulted in a crash at the roundabout at the end. I forwarded this clip to the police. What they came into play for me this time though, was a delivery I apparently signed for, but never received.
I was expecting two parcels. From separate retailers. I had emails that morning from the delivery company Hermes saying they had both of them and they’d be delivered that morning before 11.30am. The delivery drive came to the door, handed over one parcel which I signed for and he left. I thought the other one must be with another one of the drivers as this has happened before. When I got back to my computer though, I’d had two emailed, 2 minutes apart, saying both parcels had arrived. The first email at 11:22am for the one I actually signed for, with my signature. The second at 11:24am, with a random signature. I emailed Hermes and sent the retailer a message on Facebook then remembered I have a CCTV camera.
Caught Out
The upstairs camera was streaming but there was some condensation on the inside of the window so it was hard to make out what was happening. The downstairs CCTV camera was perfect though, the driver had parked in the perfect spot, for me anyway! You could see him walk up the drive with the first parcel, then return to his van. He then gets another parcel out the back and sits in the van until 11:25am when he drives off. So he must have signed for it and kept it.
I sent the footage to Hermes and I got a refund within 24 hours of when the parcel was due to be delivered. Morale of the story, sometimes have cameras on your property pays off. If you haven’t got them, maybe consider it. They don’t have to cost a lot of money and you can hook them up so you can monitor on your phone. They might help you in a future situation!
