Whenever a new piece of technology hits the market, we can rarely tell what effect it’s going to have on society until it becomes widely adopted.
And we can see one example of this phenomenon in the rise of personal security cameras, as they’ve brought an interesting double-edged sword with them. One on hand, it’s not impossible to hack these cameras, which have allowed mysterious intruders to gaze into people’s homes and harass them.
But it’s also true that some people can credibly say they’ve saved their own lives by installing these cameras around their houses and saw subtle signs of house fires or of people lurking outside their windows.
But while these emergencies are likely what these camera’s owners had in mind when they bought them, there’s no way that one woman could have predicted they’d alert her to the bizarre problem she faced one day.
On February 25, a woman who goes by busymomonli on TikTok uploaded a video featuring someone ring her doorbell.
And while that would hardly seem noteworthy at first, the fact that a car he was clearly waiting for pulled up soon after came as a cause for concern to her.
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Unfortunately, neither the woman nor her husband nor her teenage son were home and she was only aware that this was happening through the live feed on her doorbell camera.
She said in a follow-up video that she couldn’t speak to them with the camera’s microphone because it wasn’t working, but she did raise an alarm.
But while that made the man and the four people he summoned there back up a little, it didn’t deter them for long.
After he gained access to the house through the back door, he opened the front door and let the others in.
In a different follow-up video , busymomonli explained that her teenage son often leaves the backdoor unlocked despite her telling him not to. She also said that while her dog barked at these unwanted visitors, it was friendly enough that it didn’t deter them either.
Since she was a 30-minute drive away, busymomonli called the police, who were already there by the time she headed home herself.
Soon after, she learned that the man is a real estate agent who was showing the other four people her house.
This came as a big surprise to the woman because she had not put her house on the market at all.
What had apparently happened was that her neighbors were selling their house and told the agent to enter through the back. Since he was able to enter this house that way, he claimed not to realize he had showed up at the wrong place.
After she and the police confirmed that nobody had taken anything, the agent apologized profusely.
In her words, “He said in 27 years, he’s never made such a mistake.”
And since the police believed this was the result of a pure mistake, they didn’t see much utility in arresting the agent, nor did busymomonli feel inclined to press charges herself.
As she put it, “I don’t believe that they were casing my house or that he was trying to sell my house out from under me.”
That said, she is considering raising the issue with his agency or the state’s licensing bureau.
And commenters have agreed, saying that even if we can assume the agent had no ill intent, he’s still conducting his business improperly.
That’s because it’s standard practice to have a lock box set aside and to be intimately familiar with the inside of a house (i.e. taking photos) before you show it to anyone.
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