ALLEN PARK (WWJ) - Police are investigating after a hidden wifi camera was found in a metro Detroit coffee shop bathroom.
According to Allen Park Police, the tiny device which is "made for concealment" was discovered on Sunday, June 2, at the location at 23005 Outer Drive, near Southfield Road, in Allen Park.
Det. Jim Thorburn said a Starbucks staff member who was cleaning the unisex restroom found it attached to the underside of the toilet lid. It appears the camera had only recently been placed when staff noticed it, he said, and that it had probably been live streaming for about two hours, capturing at least one person in the stall.
Thorburn said the 2 inch by 1 inch device can record video to an SD card and also transmit video to a location offsite. "Somebody can log into it and see the images that it's displaying," he told WWJ's Sandra McNeill.
"So we believe the person was not recording it to the card, but they were streaming it to another location...and we believe that location would have been somewhere close to the device," he said. "I can't imagine they'd be doing it, watching the video inside the store. That would just be crazy. So I'm sure they were sitting in a car. The range isn't that great one it, so it would've had to have been close."
Sharing photos of the camera on Facebook, police noted it costs around $60 and is only slightly longer than a pen, adding: "The lens is at the end of the cable and difficult to notice!"
No suspects have been named or described, and Thorburn acknowledged that it's going to be "incredibly difficult" to find the culprit.
"It's extraordinarily disturbing and disgusting in every capacity," the detective added. "It can record women, men, children -- everything could have been recorded in there. So, yeah, I am pretty determined to catch the person because, you know, this is beyond ridiculous."
