Camera — Buy Dummy

Arthur felt a smug sense of security. He had created the "impression of active surveillance" without the $500 price tag. The Reality Check

The package arrived on Arthur’s porch on a Tuesday, looking remarkably like any other cardboard box. Inside, nestled in bubble wrap, sat the “ Sentinel-X buy dummy camera

Arthur lived in a neighborhood that was "quiet," which was local code for "the neighbor’s teenage son occasionally ‘borrows’ lawn gnomes." Tired of the missing porcelain, Arthur had looked into real surveillance. However, between the cloud storage fees and the wiring headaches, he’d opted for a —a non-functional decoy designed to fool the eye. The Installation Arthur felt a smug sense of security

Arthur kept the dummy camera up—it was still great for keeping his gnomes safe from teenagers—but that weekend, he went back online. He decided to pair his decoy with at least one functional camera. As Prepared Hero points out, while it's perfectly legal to use a decoy, relying on it alone means that when something actually goes wrong, you’re left with nothing but a very convincing piece of plastic. Inside, nestled in bubble wrap, sat the “

He realized then the trade-off he’d made. As noted by security experts at Aqara , a dummy camera provides a "false sense of safety" but . There were no alerts on his phone, no footage of the truck's license plate, and no way to prove what happened. The Moral of the Story