Slashdot Mirror
Serial Burglar Caught on Webcam
Metatron writes "The BBC is reporting about a serial burlgar caught after images recorded by a webcam were automatically emailed to an outside server. The evidence was made available to the police even though the computer itself had been stolen! This is also discussed on the victims own web site and the local newspaper in Cambridge." From the article: "I was relieved it did what I'd intended it to when I was burgled again. It was nice to catch him in the act - but it didn't stop him from stealing my things."
Note that the Slashdot "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along." certainly doesn't apply here ...
P.S. Here's my lighthearted "webcam" pictures of a man who vandelized my christmas lights snowman ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I was a victim of a Serial burglar once. I didn't have breakfast for four months because of him... /*rimshot*/
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It doesn't say a whole lot (and the victim agrees) when a serial burglar who had been imprisoned for burglary before and who was out on bail for yet another attempt only gets 11 months in prison.
:(
At 19 years old with several prior convictions and now this and they think that it will rehabilitate him to stick him in prison for another year?
Glad that this guy was able to quickly solve his case (sad that he had to pay the price once before years ago) and get this guy behind bars but I'm sure it won't stop someone else from being burglarized by this guy again.
Note to self: Next time, wear a mask.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
could we have some more info about his setup, including the cost, ease of installation... whatever he'd need to have the pics automatically posted to one of these googlemail (at least the GB of storage could be justified) accounts ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Baseball cap, thuggish look, awful clothes. Screams thieving chav. Where's the burberry?
I have mine record movements while out as well as speak "Intruder alert, intruder alert" hoping to scare any would-be burglers away while snapping their photo.
Hopefully it will never be "needed."
A great use for the new Mac Mini too!
The victim, Duncan Grisby, is the developer of the excellent omniORB CORBA ORB.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
"The webcam made our job really easy," added DS Page. "It was a pleasure to show him the pictures and see his expression when we interviewed him."
If only they had a camera...
So that's the bastard that has been stealing the toys and surprises from my cereal... oh wait... serial? Crap... always get those mixed up.
this has happened to me before... sort of. a few years ago when i was 16 or so, i knew i was going to be bored later in the day at school, so i setup my webcam to record movement with a copy of meloris melcam i downloaded off the internet. I didn't notice anything wrong while I was watching it at school, but when I returned to my room I noticed I was missing about $50. The maids that my mom hired for that day had just come to our house, so I suspected them. I checked the video that my program had saved on my HD and there they were. They went and found my wallet which was in my dresser and removed the $50 I had been saving, right in front of the camera. Apparently they arent the brightest of people as the camera was clearly visible and my computer isnt too much quieter than a jet.
You're a genius! If we legalize drugs, there will never be another reason to commit crimes. All crimes can be tracked to this single cause! Cop killers - the cops were trying to keep them away from their inalienable right to get loaded. Wife beaters - because drugs are illegal, the perpetrators needed some other way to amuse themselves. We should all sign a petition to make drugs legal immediately!
Sigh. OK, now seriously - is there any evidence behind your first claim or any data to back up your second claim, or is this just a dead horse that you're fond of beating?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Them that there varmints with their goin' around burglarizing honest folks houses.... it's making a mockery of the judiciarialary system
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
http://motion.sourceforge.net/
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
"No madam, I'm a burglar, I burgle people."
Are serial burglars faster than the old parallel burglars?
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
Or try this: coral link
Speaking of which, WTF is up with picture number 2!!!
I thinking that must be the picture they showed him to get a quick confession.
The camera is just a generic video camera with a composite output. It's connected to a BT-848 video capture card in a Linux PC. I then use motion to detect motion and capture images. I then have some Python scripts I wrote that upload the captured images to an FTP server.
I'm afraid I had to block access to my server from Slashdot. I don't have enough bandwidth for the onslaught.
Duncan.
I spent 11 hours in jail but they woke me up around 11am. That was the lame part.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
About three years ago, my brother had a roomie that he suspected was vandalising some of my brother's property. Of course, because they had a dog that was allowed to roam through the entire house, my brother couldn't prove that it had been the roomie and not the dog, becuase all of the destruction was well within the realm of a dog's capabilities. So he set up a webcam on his computer to start recording when there was motion in the room, and then storing the video on his web server. This allowed him to catch his roommate dumping a the bowl of leftover Kraft Dinner that had been left on the desk all over/into my brother's keyboard while my brother was at work.
A lot of people leave their computer(s) running when they're not around, and a lot of people have webcams sitting around that 99% of the time aren't even plugged in. I know that this is the case for me, at any rate. It's really easy to miss yet another piece of computer-related clutter on an already messy surface. Although I have to admit, it doesn't take all that much effort to look around for cameras before perpetrating a crime and "accidentally" knock them so that they're not pointed at the area where the crime will be comitted... Not that this would have helped the burglar any, since all it had to capture was him breaking in to prove at least breaking-and-entering, but when someone has a legit reason to be in the room and foils themself through sheer lack of attention... That's pretty stupid, I have to agree.
Did anyone notice he had a stripy top on? What do you suppose happened to his mask, and bag with 'swag' written on it?