Home invasions across Melbourne are nothing new, but the way they are being carried out is changing.
Berwick resident Jun Bastoni knows that better than most.
The father-of-three was sound asleep at 3am on Sunday morning when two men dressed in black hoods took the winding streets through suburbia to his doorstep.
Upon entering the street, they used technology to interfere with the wireless CCTV cameras at several properties, including Mr Bastoni’s, before creeping through the front door and taking what they came for — not one but two of his cars, including a luxury white Mercedes-Benz.
“Both my cars were stolen last night. One at 3am and the other at 5am,” Mr Bastoni said in a video posted to social media.
“They broke into my house, stole the car keys, took off with my white Mercedes AMG… and a white Rav 4. All the cameras in the street are down; they’re offline.
“If you’ve just got WiFi cameras, these c**** have a WiFi jammer and it jams everyone’s WiFi.
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“My cameras didn’t pick up anything. Next door neighbours’ are all offline. Other ones down the street are all offline. They’ve jammed the whole street and then f***ing taken my car.”
Mr Bastoni said he believes the WiFi jammer wasn’t the only piece of technology they used when targeting him specifically.
“They’ve put a tracker on my car, found out where I live and now they’ve got my car. So we’re f***ed now. Melbourne, you are f***ed now, you are absolutely f***ed,” he said.
“People can just walk through your house while I’ve got three daughters sleeping upstairs and my wife and we didn’t hear a f****ing thing.
“They were specifically after the cars. If I’d found these guys in the house I’d have a dead body in the house now.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow… I’m not going to let it go. Be careful. Check your cars at shopping centres. If you’ve got a nice car, these guys are going to come for you. I never thought this would happen to me and I live in a place where no one just comes past.
“You need to take a lot of turns to get to where my house is. This was a targeted thing and they knew exactly what to do.”
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A Victoria Police spokesperson told news.com.au they are investigating after the break-in at Mittagong Court.
“Police are making enquiries to determine whether CCTV cameras in the neighbourhood were disabled at the time of the aggravated burglary,” the spokesperson said.
A neighbour’s camera, which was not linked to WiFi, captured the thieves as they entered and exited the driveway. But police have no new leads on the pair’s whereabouts.
Dr David Tuffley, a senior lecturer in cyber technology at Griffith University, said the technology is illegal to use in Australia but “easier to get than most people might expect”.
“You can buy them from overseas websites and have them shipped here, though Australian Border Force does intercept some,” he told news.com.au.
“You can also build one from cheap electronics — under $50 in parts — using tutorials freely available online.
“Owning or using a jammer in Australia is illegal under the Radiocommunications Act 1992, with penalties up to $1.375 million and five years in prison. But criminals willing to do a home invasion aren’t losing sleep over a regulatory notice.”
Dr Tuffley explained that the devices work on a simple premise — that WiFi is like a conversation.
“A jammer walks into the room and starts yelling so nobody can hear anything above the noise,” he said.
“They flood the same radio frequencies your router and cameras use — 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz — with noise. Security cameras lose their connection, stop uploading video, and stop sending out alerts.
“The house looks monitored from the street. But the system is effectively blind. Some of the more sophisticated jammer devices go further and send forged ‘disconnect’ commands to every device on the network, forcing them offline without any radio noise at all. Either way, the cameras record nothing and alert nobody.”
It’s a situation that Albury resident Drew Cameron found himself in recently, too.
Mr Cameron had the driver profile on his luxury BMW hacked by thieves who tracked him to his home before returning after dark to take the car.
He woke as they were driving out.
The thieves also used a WiFi jammer to block his cameras, “so they went blank for however long they were in the vicinity”.
The targeting of luxury vehicles is at an all-time high in Victoria. Crime statistics show that 32,000 cars were stolen in the last year, more than at any time on record.
Children committed 57 per cent of all carjackings, 52 per cent of home invasions, 48 per cent of aggravated burglaries and 62 per cent of all robberies, according to the Herald Sun.
Dr Tuffley says there are some things Victorians can do — a few practical fixes.
“The core problem is an over-reliance on WiFi,” he said.
“Go wired — cameras connected by cable can’t be jammed. For your front door and driveway, wired is the strongest option.”
He also suggested using cameras with SD cards — “even if the internet connection drops out, local storage keeps recording.
“The thief can kill the upload — but not the footage. The bottom line is if your entire security setup runs on WiFi alone, it has a single point of failure, and the criminals know this. The best defence is to have redundancy.”
Mr Bastoni has set up a GoFundMe page to recover some of the costs. His Mercedes, he revealed, was not insured.
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