Originally Posted by
dweenk
Funny you should mention that. Last Friday I saw a young man walking across our neighbor's yard into ours. My vantage point was 2nd floor of the garage, and by the time I got outside he was gone, having attached (by rubber band) business cards for a landscaping company. I thought it rude that he walked across yards instead of using the walk, but ignored it. After the break-in I had second thoughts. I had tossed the business cards he had left, but my neighbor had kept one; so the detectives have that now.
I thought it strange that:
A landscaper (businessman) would be so inconsiderate as to walk across a potential customer's property. He would park in front to display the sign on his truck and use the walkway.
A landscaper (businessman) would take the time to canvass a neighborhood himself when he could be making $ doing pre-spring cleanup.
A landscaper (businessman) would use an hourly employee on such a mission.
Now another thought was that the landscaper may have engaged a guy at random to spread his cards across a neighborhood. The detectives did seem to be interested, and came to a similar conclusion.
Regarding the video cameras, as long as you used a hard-wired USB webcam, connected to a computer with no internet access, I don't see any possible way your surveillance videos could ever get on the net unless you posted them. Of course you won't get real-time warnings of a break-in if you're at work, and the thief may decide to take the computer (make sure it's an old POS one) but those game cameras are pretty expensive, that's why I decided not to use them. But there's no reason why a well-hidden game camera wouldn't work.
Regarding the landscaper, I had some skinny kid come to the front door one time offering to do stump grinding on some stumps. I thought it odd that he rode up on a BMX bike. Then about a month later, I caught the same kid trying to enter the house through an unlocked sliding glass door in the backyard. He had a million and one excuses, but it was pretty obvious he was attempting a daytime burglary. So I guess pretending to be a tradesman soliciting business is a common way to case a house for future burglaries.
