Firstly I’m so sorry to hear about the theft.
Also, welcome to the community. This is mostly a forum of other Wyze users, but I’ll be happy to provide my own personal understandings of the answers to your questions (though I don’t represent Wyze in any official way).
-
Does Wyze have warranty replacement for stolen cameras?
- Not at this time. For now the best option is to try to have these things covered under some kind of insurance such as Home Owners or Renters Insurance. There is a wishlist to have Wyze offer theft insurance together with their Cam Plus subscription:
Cam plus subscription - include theft protection but if we’re just talking about the warranty, then no, here is a copy of the warranty: Refund policy – Wyze
- Not at this time. For now the best option is to try to have these things covered under some kind of insurance such as Home Owners or Renters Insurance. There is a wishlist to have Wyze offer theft insurance together with their Cam Plus subscription:
-
Why doesnt PERSON ONLY notification no longer works?!
- In short, Apple bought out the rights to the code that previously allowed this be on the limited memory cams for free, then Apple said nobody else was allowed to use that code anymore. Wyze created their own Cloud based AI alternative and initially made it free, but with Wyze using such a low profit margin business model, their finance advisor indicated the cloud processing was using too much of their limited resources and it was not sustainable to keep offering for free when their cameras are so low in cost with not enough profit margin to make up for it. Wyze has indicated in other AMA’s and such that they MAY consider creating another local person detection option on a future Wyze device that could more easily handle that. It may or may not ever happen now that they’ve invested so much in their advanced cloud AI, but it wasn’t ruled out, and they have even had job postings for Edge(local) AI solutions, so who knows what the future holds. For now, you can subscribe to Cam Plus and get just person notifications (that’s what I do, I have it for all my cams and I have some of them only tell me about person notifications and nothing else), but I was assuming you were talking about a free option. You can sometimes use detection zones and sensitivity levels to help with this (I used to do this on cams that didn’t have person detection). Still, none of that makes a difference to the current situation though. Even if we ever eventually get free person detection again, it won’t undo the emotional and financial distress these people inflicted on you currently. I hope Law Enforcement can help in some way (your home or renters insurance might also be able to help).
-
Why doesnt Wyze automatically notify you that one of your camera is offline?
- I am showing that Wyze says they are researching doing this. There is a wishlist item for this. I recommend going to the following link and voting your support for implementing this:
Loss of Communication/Network Connection Notification & Log
I also voted for this wishlist item and agree that it would be a great feature.
- I am showing that Wyze says they are researching doing this. There is a wishlist item for this. I recommend going to the following link and voting your support for implementing this:
-
Why is getting ahold of someone from support so difficult?
- There are a lot of things that contribute to this. It is a big problem in general for lots of companies right now, including companies I personally have ownership in. Regardless of the causes, I’ll talk about solutions. I personally like to contact Wyze by email instead of by phone. This allows me to explain everything I think is important, send it to them and then go do whatever else I want while I wait. When they reply, I can get back to it whenever I feel like it, whenever is convenient for me. I can do it in cracks of time. I love the email support for this reason. I totally understand that some people prefer phone interaction and immediate responses though, so I am glad they still allow that option. Different times of day have lower hold times though. I think most people are calling when they get off work and are free, but since everyone else is also doing that, the hold times will be worse then. Wyze recently said after they got a lot of investor money that they are using some of it to make upgrades to their customer service, so I expect to see improvements coming.
-
Any way to report it stolen, to blacklist it from being used by theft?
- Not that I am aware of. As I recall, Wyze has been working on making harder to use stolen devices with some of the recent models. I don’t recall the details off-hand (maybe someone else will chime in), but for now, I personally would keep those cameras on my account (not delete the device). Depending on the particular model, I think there is at least one of them that has problems activating to a new account if it hasn’t been deleted out of the old one. I could be wrong on that though.
Again, those are my understandings to the answers to the questions. I wish there was some way I could help better. Did any of the cloud events capture the perpetrators at all? I hope you hurry and download or save those events if they were captured on the cloud events. And I assume Law enforcement was contacted. Maybe insurance can help restore some of the loss.