BILLINGS — Residents in a Blue Creek neighborhood in south Billings are dealing with a rash of car break-ins, and they believe the suspects are using unique technology to avoid detection.
See a wired camera capture the footage of a break-in below:
The break-ins occurred late Saturday night and early Sunday morning off Blue Creek Road on Santiago Boulevard.
"This is the first time we've had anything happen in this neighborhood," said Rhiannon Briggs, one of the victims who's lived in the neighborhood for eight years.
The privacy and lack of crime in the area is what drew Briggs to the neighborhood, but that sense of security was shattered when thieves targeted multiple vehicles, including her own.
"They were looking for open car doors. They took everything out of the glove box, everything out of the center consoles and just took off," she told MTN Wednesday.
For Briggs, the thieves made off with a package of gun ammunition and a vape from her center console. Her wired security cameras captured the moment when the suspects broke into her neighbor's car and then her own (see photo below).
"I'm guessing they were going through cash, wallets," she said.
What has residents particularly concerned is that none of the wireless cameras in the neighborhood captured the crime, leading them to believe the suspects used signal jammers. Briggs' residence has a handful of wireless cameras, none of which were connected to the Wi-Fi during the incident.
MTN also spoke to various residents in the Blue Creek neighborhood who experienced car break-ins. One man, who asked to remain anonymous, said his security camera captured one of the break-ins, but he has a wired camera.
"They had to have had a jammer," said Briggs. "It's the only way that none of our cameras would've caught 'em."
Signal jammers are devices that can be easily purchased online, with some costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
These devices can disrupt wireless signals, making it appear as though there are no available Wi-Fi signals for nearby devices to connect to, according to Dylan Solberg, the founder of Billings Tech Guys.
Solberg said jammers overload devices by repeating the same signal and broadcasting lots of traffic to the same network.
"In the end game, if they're looking to shut down cameras, like Ring cameras, Nest cameras, you know the normal cameras that residential clients have," he said. "It's definitely possible."
Solberg explained that while wireless cameras are easy to install and access through a phone app, their signals can be cut by these devices nearby. He said depending on the strength of the jammer, these devices can cut out WiFi signals for multiple households in an area.
"So what a WiFi interceptor does, basically it kills your WiFi signal, or jams it, with multiple different signals or signals of the same sort," he told MTN.
MTN reached out to the Billings Police Department regarding the car break-ins, and whether signal jammers may have contributed to the fact that many doorbell cameras didn't capture the break-ins. Billings police's administrative lieutenant, Samantha Puckett, said she's aware of the crime but does not believe signal jammers were the cause of the phenomenon.
However, Briggs and her neighbors remain convinced that the technology was used against them, and it's even prompted Briggs to invest in wired cameras exclusively.
"This is going to make us upgrade our camera systems to wired, so we already have that on order," she said.
On top of investing in wired cameras, which Solberg said are nearly impossible to be "jammed," Briggs encourages people to keep their car doors locked, and keep all valuables inside of the home.
"These criminals seem to know what they're doing," she said.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist, and portions of this article have been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
