Best Security Tricks That Will Fool Any Burglar

You already know the basics of pro­tect­ing your home. You know the val­ue of a home alarm sys­tem, and you’ve installed strong locks and doors. But some­times, you want to go the extra mile with secu­ri­ty tricks to foil any poten­tial burglar’s plans.

Check out these cre­ative secu­ri­ty tricks and strate­gies, and prod­ucts for out­smart­ing poten­tial bur­glars:

• • Light timers

If your lights stay off all the time when you’re away, it’s often clear that you’re not home, mak­ing your home vul­ner­a­ble. You could leave your lights on, but it can still be spot­ted by a bur­glar as an unnat­ur­al habit, con­tin­u­ing the red flag that the house may be unoc­cu­pied. In the end, you would just end up with a high­er elec­tric­i­ty bill.

Instead, use auto­mat­ed timers to have your lights turn on and off each day to make it look like some­body is home.

• • FakeTV

The lights aren’t the only thing that will send a sig­nal telling bur­glars your home is occu­pied. Devices like FakeTV mim­ic the light pat­terns of a flick­er­ing tele­vi­sion, but it uses far less elec­tric­i­ty than an actu­al tele­vi­sion. Just like your lights, you can set them up to turn on and off to fool bur­glars into think­ing that you are home.

• • Your neighbour’s garbage

It may sound strange, but your neighbour’s garbage could make the dif­fer­ence between a bur­glar think­ing that you’re home or think­ing that you are away.

If you’re going to be leav­ing for a long vaca­tion, invite them to leave some of their garbage in your bins and put them on the curb when it is garbage col­lec­tion day. Oth­er­wise, a thief could see no garbage being pro­duced at your house.

• • Oth­er neigh­bourly assis­tance

Trash isn’t the only help­ful thing your neigh­bours can do for your home. Park­ing in your dri­ve­way, mow­ing your lawn and leav­ing foot­prints through snow up to your door are all ways that neigh­bours can help each oth­er out to fool bur­glars.

• • Fake inter­com

A bur­glar try­ing to tell if you are home might be buzzing up to your apart­ment unit. Before you leave, ask your super if they can tem­porar­i­ly redi­rect your inter­com from your home phone to your cell. That way, you can talk to the per­son at your door as if you were in your house, even if you’re on the oth­er side of the world.

The bot­tom line is that it’s impor­tant nev­er to make your home look like it is unoc­cu­pied. Do what you can to keep bur­glars at bay by mak­ing it seem like there is always some­one home!