Several years ago I was a manager for a small convenience store inside the city. We operated in the middle of a rough neighborhood in which stickups as well as robberies were common. We outfitted the store using a security system to be able to help reduce our losses.
One day we started to think that the cashier was taking money from us and completely bypassing the security system that we had put into place. A friend of mine offered to help by making a hidden camera for us using a pinhole camera.
Pinhole cameras are very small camera lenses fitted on top of a printed circuit board. These board cameras are the primary parts used in making all sorts of hidden and also dome cameras however are usually sold on their own to private investigators and also engineers.
These cameras are little enough to be built into bigger things allowing you to make your very own hidden cameras. Theyre low-cost gadgets and also have a wide angle of view however have a lot of fixed features so their capabilities are limited.
Beneath the pretext of maintenance and repair work I had taken the cash register to my good friends store. He took it apart picked an area that will allow us to view the cashier and also re-arranged the cables and parts within to help make room for a spy camera.
He set up a high resolution CMOS camera with audio and attached the tools that we would require to obtain the video and also play it back. After trying out the board camera in his shop we took the cash register back to our store and began watching the cashier.
Over the course of a couple weeks we gathered proof against the rogue cashier. We discovered that she was not only taking money but also cigarettes in the display behind her and food from the shop.
We ended up filing charges of theft with the police. The evidence got by the pinhole camera was important in our criminal case against her. She was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment and also had to pay a fine based on the worth of the stolen goods.