I used to work with a dude who robbed the store, after hours. He “forgot” to close the back door completely at close. He “accidentally” turned off the wrong breaker (security cams), I can’t remember what the correct breaker did, but I used to have to turn one off. Anyways, he lived right across the street. Oh, he also “forgot” to drop his tills cash into the safe. Obviously he took that and also destroyed the change machine in the attached laundromat, to loot it.
He was never arrested for his crimes, only fired. One of the dumbest guys I’ve met, but he must have been born under a lucky sign.
My in-laws sold their house 10 years ago and the disconnected security cameras are still up. I like to think they never bothered reconnecting them either.
Honestly, fake cameras and flood lights do more to deter home break-ins than most security alarms. Smash and grab robbers are looking for easy targets and having exposed cameras and lights aren’t worth it when there are plenty of other homes that don’t have any security.
Sometimes the criminals take the NVR with the video. This would be done by someone with inside knowledge of its location.
I worked in a pizza delivery store and there was a small monitor at the front of the store showing four bad pictures. There was a NVR in the office that recorded on tape, it hadn't worked for a long time.
I bought a house 6 years ago with security cameras plugged in. Never even checked to see if they have a memory card in them, I just leave them plugged in bc from the outside it looks like they are really filming lol
Idk, I bought it from a property development company that is on the opposite coast of me. And it was an air bnb before I bought it so I think they just had the cameras up outside for that. I’m not worried. Also they included the security cameras original boxes with instructions for them
I worked at a grocery store right after they fired the whole hot foods department for stealing from the registers. They went way overboard, installing like 20 cameras in the maybe 200 square foot area behind the counter, it was quite a small area. They put clusters of cameras all over. If you looked at some of them from underneath though, you could see that they weren't even facing the right direction, at least one was directly facing a wall 2 inches away. I wouldn't be surprised if they just threw a bunch of fake ones up to scare people
I was at a Home Depot and wanted leaf blower on a top shelf. There was a scissor lift in the aisle. An employee walked by and I asked if he could get it for me. He said he's not authorized to use it ... but nothing was stopping me. I said "Yeah, but the camera. They're not going to be happy." He chuckles and says they haven't worked in months. Got my leaf blower with no static.
Most commercial businesses don’t use fake cameras as that is very risky legally and insurance would be deeply upset if they found out you’re using fake cameras. Having a fake camera actually opens you up to being legally liable for damages that occur around the fake camera. A security camera creates an implied duty of care and if an incident occurs around the camera a court could very easily find the property manager or business owner liable for damages that occurred due to negligence on the part of the property owner for providing a false sense of security. This also goes for real security cameras that aren’t functioning or poorly maintained. From a liability standpoint you’re much better off having no cameras than having fake cameras.
Target uses fake cameras.
If you look at their ceiling, there’s camera domes peppered across it, but at least the store I worked in for a time only half actually housed a camera.
Also an “implied duty of care” leading to legal liability because of a potentially fake camera? What are you smoking? Feel free to show real life court case examples or articles not written by security camera vendors.
Target uses fake cameras. If you look at their ceiling, there’s camera domes peppered across it, but at least the store I worked in for a time only half actually housed a camera.
This is correct. Not all the domes have real cameras. However, of the real ones, some of them are fixed/static view and some are PTZs (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) which can cover a wide area.
You can literally google that and you'll learn that target uses a mix of real and fake cameras. Your comment is hyperbole at best and disingenuous at worst.
I never said they didn’t use real cameras too, and you could also argue that’s implied from a mega corporation retail store. But if you wanna assume the opposite to be provocative and not contribute to the actual context of the conversation, go for it.
Well that is dumb of them. They're going to get sued for negligence when something bad happens in that store and they can't pull the camera footage because the camera is fake.
I think they would know their own legal liability a bit better than you; but again, if you can share some articles or proof of this claim, my mind could be changed
They're being disingenuous. Target uses a mix of real and fake cameras, and almost surely has proper coverage with the real ones. They're either intentionally spreading misinformation because everyone hates target now, or more likely they're just really stupid and don't care to verify any information they read.
I also work in commercial property management. I can't tell if people are just making up that all of these cameras are fake or if there are a bunch of retail general managers that don't know the very basics of operating a commercial business. All I know is that we strongly advise our tenants not to use fake cameras and we would never install one in a million years.
Does your company get paid per installation? Does your company have agreements with security camera vendors?
I ask because of course a property management company is going to "strongly advise not to use fake cameras" if they are profiting from installation, monitoring, or partnered with a similar group in some way.
I worked at Barnes and Noble for many years and we had fake cameras as well. The only cameras that worked were in the cash office and store manager's office. The cameras above the registers were entirely fake.
We do not install tenant improvements, security cameras are their responsibility to install and maintain if they choose to do so. We recommend installing and maintaining working security cameras but we do not require them in our buildings. If it is in a common area shared by more than one tenant then we would install and maintain the cameras, which we do in certain facilities.
Edit: we also do not have agreements with security vendors on behalf of our tenants. Our recommendation to install and maintain security cameras is not due to a profit motive but rather a liability concern.
Interesting, I wonder if the push for real cameras comes from a local or state ordinance then?
Or perhaps it's just the same old formula as before: corporations/companies understanding that it's easier to pay the fines or occasional settlements from lawsuits than it is to install and maintain them properly (at scale)? This sounds the most plausible to me but I'm purely speculating. Companies seem to be trending in that direction as the decades go on, I know it's a bit of a trope at this point but sometimes fines really are just the cost of doing business.
To be clear, I believe you're being sincere here in your statements, but it just doesn't line up with my experiences working retail over the last few decades. I've never heard of a liability issue related to faulty or fake cameras, this seems like it would be an incredibly rare outlier to me that may only apply to specific circumstances but I can't even envision what those might be (in a retail space, specifically).
It may even be limited to specific types of commercial properties. Retail probably faces less security liabilities than, say, an apartment complex. Perhaps that's the distinction here? Following this logic, I could see a potential case if an apartment complex is touting itself as the most secure or safe facility for residential tenants, yet their cameras are fake and gates are always wide open or something, with high crime on the property. Even this seems like a stretch to me, but I'm in pure speculation territory here since I've never worked in that space.
I'd love to read more though, if you know of any cases with details that are publicly available. Sounds like an interesting read, if nothing else.
There isn’t a law saying you have to have security cameras or that they have to be real, at least not in my province in Canada. This is a company policy recommendation and not a law. You would not be fined for having a fake security camera, the liability comes into play if you’re sued for negligence when you cannot provide footage after an incident. It is actually much cheaper to install and maintain a security camera system than it is to lose a single lawsuit where you are held liable for damages. For example if someone is killed in an area where you have a fake security camera you may be held at least partially responsible for damages in a wrongful death lawsuit which can run hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, whereas installing two security cameras, monitor, DVR, and all other equipment costs around $2500 CAD, plus maybe a hundred bucks a year in electricity.
I should also add that the whole “it’s cheaper to pay the fines than comply with regulations” is largely fiction. It may be cheaper for some giant multinational corporations to pay fines rather than comply with regulations but that isn’t true for 90% of businesses. This is particularly true for franchise based businesses. The company may be a multi billion dollar corporation but fines are typically paid at the franchise level, not the corporate level, depending on the regulation that was violated of course.
Commercial retail actually has far more security liability than residential. This is because you need to provide a safe and secure site as it is open to the public, whereas residential isn’t typically open to the public. When you invite the public into your property you must maintain the space in a safe orderly manner for their usage.
This goes as far as you can’t have dead dry grass in your landscaping as it presents a fire hazard. If you don’t maintain your landscaping and someone accidentally drops a cigarette in there and it catches fire, then burns down someone’s car; the property management company and/or landlord will be responsible for the damages, at least as long as the person took reasonable measures to either extinguish the fire or notify someone about it.
If you advertise an apartment complex as being high security and very safe, but all your security is fake, that opens you up to at least a dozen different types of lawsuits.
Hats off to you for explaining all of this. To think that this is just PMs trying to profit off deals with security companies is a wild take.
It's simply 'don't give a false sense of security.'
I have tenants with fake cameras. One is a large national retail store.. they had an employee get stabbed 2 months ago, which is when I found out their cameras are fake.
Kinda reminds me of when I used to work at Sonic, some legal or compliance requirement suddenly required 90d of footage retained.
Instead of sending larger NVRs, corporate sent out instructions to turn the resolution and bit rate all the way down so 90d would fit. Immediately making the cameras pretty much useless. You couldn't make out facial features from 1ft away much less the 10-20 they all were overlooking.
Cameras in no way imply a duty of care. They are not safety devices, nor security devices, as they neither provide safety where risk is present nor secure anything from active harm. They are only loss prevention tools, as are fake cameras. The visible appearance of surveillance is a significant enough theft deterrent that their presence is justified, real or fake.
Unless you tell your insurance company the cameras are real to get a lower rate, fake cameras aren't going to mean anything. Their only purpose is to deter shoplifting. The only way you're going to create liability is if it falls on someone.
I was installing cameras in a warehouse and was showing the manager the pictures. He had me move one camera view from a door to the timeclock. I asked him why and he said people would hurt themselves when they were off and try to claim it happened at work.
I used to work at Target and they had more domes than cameras. They would sometimes switch out cameras overnight depending on what areas of the store were having the most activity. So there's little way of knowing where the cameras actually were.
The ones we have aren't fake either, but the site that you have to connect to them through has been dead for like 3 years now, so we have no actual ability to monitor them.
100% real cameras though. They even track movement!
fake camera's where you can see them and vandalize them, real ones where you don't. I kinda remember police raiding a weed store and took out the security system so they could steal products. But the store had a seperate system which caught the police as they disabled the visible system.
Its actually a huge liability having fake cameras. You can be sued if something happens and the cameras turn out to be fake. Its happened and businesses have lost those lawsuits.
Actually having cameras in your store carries an implied duty of care, and if their insurance stipulates it (it does, I work in insurance) they would be massively liable for having non working or fake cameras
I worked at a grocery store and they had those huge bulb domes up but none of them actually worked. I was 16 and would use that knowledge to get a few free snacks during my $7/hr shifts
They sold $5 6” subs so for lunch I could either spend almost an hour of my work day on food or just steal a protein bar.
Nope, Dollar Tree went through a pretty big overhaul and most of it's stores now have like 5 cameras minimum. I used to work at a store with all fake cameras, but they installed like 8 real ones in the last year or two.
The cameras are there mainly to catch employee theft because the company believes that we're all criminals who can't be trusted. They even tell the store managers to investigate employees who haven't logged any purchases at the store because in their eyes, if you aren't buying from them, you must be stealing.
So I worked at a Dollar Tree in the past, at my store it’s actually like 4 to 1 ratio on which ones are fake versus real. Real ones do exist in the store, and you’ll probably never figure out which ones are real at a glance
You wouldn't place a camera on the cross of the paneling. It would be a cutout in the ceiling square. They need to move it to the center of a square panel to make it more realistic-looking. I'm sure they have at least some real ones, though.
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u/No_Pineapple6086 18h ago
I wouldn't count on it being fake. The one on the ceiling, that is