I’m so sorry to hear this happened. I would be so frustrated as well.
Customer’s thoughts are my first thoughts as well. I read through several studies on this for college, and the various studies found that most burglaries/thefts were done by someone who knew at least one of the household members, such as a family member (majority of burglaries were substance-addicted family members), neighbor, or someone who has visited the house before (including children’s friends, etc), or they were told by one of those people who had been to the house before when would be a good time to burglarize it and suggested ways to get in. Stranger burglaries of opportunity are apparently the uncommon exception to what it usually is in all solved cases.
In all but a very few rare cases, the culprit ends up being a teenager or desperate adult drug addict. I hope your brother wasn’t involved in any way.
There are a lot of possibilities, none of them pleasant to contemplate. Is it possible someone else who knows someone in your family well or had been to the house before would know how to enter without being on that camera (I don’t know your positioning, so I can’t say)? Could they have flicked the breaker or pulled the power cord right away (then the video wouldn’t get a chance to finish the upload, and when they plugged it back in after leaving it would take a minute to boot back up). Does anyone know you only use cloud for your videos? Even if they didn’t know that, some habitual burglars now carry WiFi and cellular jammers with them to prevent people from getting security alerts, and this would also prevent cloud uploads (another good reason to have SD cards as a backup). They could also come up from a blindspot position they knew the camera wouldn’t see. All of those things would explain why it didn’t show up. Also, check your motion sensitivity settings. What time of day was it? That can make a big difference. What cam version was it? Were you using night vision and with or without IR? How much lighting was there?
Of course, this whole post is me speaking my own personal opinions and interpretations (I don’t work for nor represent Wyze in any way), but for what it is worth, I remember watching an AMA in October 2020 when this exact question came up about who at Wyze could or would have access to our data, such as video data. It was even discussed in the context of a scenario just like the one raised here, a burglary. Wyze leadership clarified that our data (including video) is encrypted, and not available to employees in general, including most the higher ranking staff who were on screen at the time. Wyze Jimmy even specifically mentioned that even he has no access to our cams. So T. Liu clarified that they use AWS SSO, which allows them to limit access to all this stuff. Nobody at Wyze can just secretly access our videos on their own accord. T. Liu said that even those employees actively developing the system with special permissions and oversight were “not granted the permission to directly download video” so even when they had some special permissions they were not granting anyone permissions to download videos. I suspect that Wyze does not grant any employees access to our video data (since there is no need), and if ever that did occur, it would be impossible to do in secret without leaving obvious database logs and huge red flags. It’s just astronomically absurd. The only people who could possibly do it would have to be out of their minds to all conspire together and risk everything they have going for them which is astronomically better and more secure than petty theft or burglary…and they’d have to involve multiple other people, and honestly, I agree with Ben Franklin: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Or Orwell: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” There is just no way this is realistic IMO.
Man, I wish there was something I could do to help with your burglary situation! So frustrating. For the future, since you have cam plus and it will filter important detections I would also recommend making sure the sensitivity settings are up high. Usually, lower sensitivity settings are good if you don’t have cam plus and need to limit how often you get alerts of ANY motion, but if you have cam plus, the AI will do that for you if you need to make absolutely sure it doesn’t miss anything.
I echo what others said about using an SD card. I have Cam Plus on ALL my cams, but I also have an SD card that records 24/7 just to be safe and make sure I can always review any time period if needed, or in case power or internet or WiFi interference or anything else happens. Murphy’s Law insurance and all that.
I hope you had insurance, and I hope you can all feel safe again. Hopefully SD cards as backup can help with that. Like I said, I have cam plus on every cam and keep my sensitivity high, and while it’s been reliable for me, I still keep SD cards as extra backup. I am very glad Wyze allows us to use both at the same time. I hope it helps, but even more so, I hope you never need it and never have to deal with this again.