An eight-year-old girl from Tennessee received the shock of her life after a stranger hacked into her bedroom security camera and tried to talk to her.
Ashley LeMay, a nurse and mother of three living in Memphis, told WMC-TV that she recently purchased a Ring security camera during a Black Friday sale in order to keep tabs on her kids while she worked the night shift at a local hospital. However, days after LeMay set up the camera, which was recommended to her by a friend who also has kids, her daughter heard the chilling sound of a man from the device mounted in her bedroom.
"Don't you want to be my best friend?"
At first, she thought she heard music coming from her bedroom so she made her way to the bedroom thinking it was her sister. Once she entered the room, she started hearing a banging noise and upon enquiry, the stranger speaks out of the camera's speakers to the little girl, saying he wants to be her best friend, as you can see in video footage recorded by the camera below:
"Who is that?" the child asks. "I'm your best friend," he replies. "I'm Santa Claus. Don't you want to be my best friend?," he asks as the child screams for her mommy.
LeMay said she did a lot of research before purchasing the Ring camera and considered it to be "safe." Ring cameras are essentially Wi-Fi-enabled devices that work through a mobile app and allow users to see real-time video footage and communicate using the camera's speaker.
"They could have watched them sleeping, changing. I mean they could have seen all kinds of things," she said. "Honestly, my gut, it makes me feel like it's either somebody who knows us or somebody who is very close by." The family has since had the camera removed and they intend to return it to the store.
A Ring spokesperson said it was investigating the video and iterated this was not a breach of the company's overall security, according to Fox Business. However, the company has urged customers to enable two-factor authentication for security, which local TV stations reported the family had not done.
Second incident this week
This is the second time this week that a family's Ring camera has been hacked into. Earlier this week, a Georgia couple woke up with a scare after their Ring camera, which they had installed to check on their puppy while they're at work, was hacked by a man who tried to wake them up while they were sleeping.
The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told WSB-TV she was in bed when an unidentified man began speaking through their bedroom camera, clapping and telling them to "wake up!"
"Hello? Hello? I can see you in the bed, come on, wake the f*** up," he says after multiple ignored commands. The creepy footage of the incident was later shared on Twitter by a friend of the couple.
