A Stranger Talked to Her Through the Camera. Someone Else Was Already Talking.

In December 2019, a family in Mississippi installed a home security camera in the bedroom their three young daughters shared.¹

Four days later, the eight-year-old heard music coming from her room. She went in. The music was coming from the camera on the wall.

Then a man's voice started talking to her.

It said her name. It told her it was Santa Claus. It asked her if she wanted to be his best friend. It encouraged her to misbehave.¹

She screamed for her mother.

The family had not been hacked in the usual sense. The camera company said its systems were not breached. Instead, someone had gotten the family's login, probably from a password used on another website that had leaked, and logged straight into their account.¹

It was not the only case. That same month, families across the United States reported strangers talking to them, and to their children, through home cameras. The company urged customers to use stronger passwords and two-step login.¹ Similar incidents have been reported with baby monitors for years.²

There is a thing about these stories that people do not like to think about for long.

Most of them were only discovered because the stranger decided to talk.

Detective Lauren Pike worked cybercrime in a county sheriff's office in Indiana. Most of her cases were scams. Grandparents tricked out of savings. Stolen credit cards.

In February, a couple named Hollis brought in an indoor security camera in a plastic bag.

Their daughter, Mia, was seven. They had put the camera in her room because she had started sleepwalking. Two weeks after they installed it, Mia's mother heard a man's voice through the baby monitor app at two in the morning.

The voice was talking to Mia. Softly. Gently. Asking questions.

Are you awake? Do you want to play a game? Can you open your door for me?

Her mother ran in and ripped the camera off the wall.

Lauren had seen this before. Reused password. A stranger buying stolen logins, scanning for cameras, finding a child. She traced the login.

It took her six weeks. The account had been accessed from a house in Ohio. The person using it was nineteen. He had bought a list of stolen passwords on a forum and tried them on camera accounts for fun.

He confessed almost immediately when the police knocked on his door. He was crying. He said he had never meant anything. He said he just liked watching.

Then he said something that made the Ohio officer stop the interview and call Lauren.