Woman Discovers Hidden Camera In Her Airbnb's Bathroom & Realizes It Captured The 'Atrocious' Things She Did The Night Before
They all thought their friend was just paranoid when she said she felt like she was being watched.
TikTok It's one of those things you might think doesn't really happen all that much until it actually happens to you — discovering a hidden camera in an Airbnb or hotel room.
One woman on TikTok recently shared her experience with this terrible trend, and why the guy who owned the Airbnb may end up getting more than he bargained for.
A group of women on a girls' trip dismissed their 'paranoid' friend convinced there was a hidden camera in an Airbnb they stayed in.
TikToker "@kennedyallegedly" and 15 of her friends were on a girls' trip to British Columbia, Canada's Sunshine Coast for a friend's 30th birthday. All was going well until one woman on the trip started getting a sinking feeling about the place.
"One of our friends was like, 'guys, I'm really paranoid, I feel like there's cameras in the house,'" Kennedy said in her video. But they thought she was just overreacting. "We were like, 'girl, you watch way too much TikTok, there are no cameras in this house, you're just being dramatic.'" Their tune quickly changed, however.
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The suspicious housemate then went on a search for a hidden camera in the Airbnb and found an electrical outlet that mysteriously didn't work.
The paranoid woman was undeterred by her friends' "you watch too much TikTok" attitude and began a full search of the premises. "She whipped out her flashlight, and she went investigating," Kennedy said. "She looked in, like, every single showerhead, all the picture frames, door knobs, everywhere in the house for a camera."
Her search turned up nothing until she began investigating an electrical outlet in the bathroom that "faced directly to the shower" that seemed to be broken. "So first of all," Kennedy said, "this outlet did not work, you couldn't plug anything into it." And sure enough, when the paranoid friend took a look with her flashlight, it turned out there was a reason you couldn't plug anything into the outlet.
Showing photos of the outlet, Kennedy said, "You can see in the top here, there's nothing. Looks totally normal." But in the bottom outlet, you can clearly see a camera lens in the part of the outlet where the grounding prong would plug in. "In the bottom one," Kennedy said, "look at that little camera girl. Anyway, we freaked out, and called the cops."
The TikToker was immediately embarrassed because she realized the hidden camera had caught her having stomach problems the night before.
"I was really embarrassed, personally," Kennedy said, "because of the absolutely atrocious things I was doing in that bathroom the night prior... If that footage sees the light of day..." she said nervously.
This isn't the first time Kennedy has been caught in a humiliating experience with her own gastrointestinal tract, in fact. She previously went viral in December 2022 after posting about "destroying" the bathroom in her boyfriend's parent's house on her first Christmas visit home with her boyfriend. She has really bad luck with this!
But while that incident was merely embarrassing, this one was also of course illegal. After attempting and failing to retrieve the camera themselves from the outlet, they called the police.
The police found more than one hidden camera in the Airbnb, and there were other things that gave the TikToker 'weird vibes' as well.
After Kennedy and her friends called the police, they "searched the place" and found more than just the bathroom outlet camera, and that was a turning point for Kennedy. "Like, part of me was not convinced it was real," she said. "And then they found the cameras, which means we had been there for a night, like, showering and things."
She later noticed other details of the Airbnb that were very off as she posted in a follow-up TikTok that featured a screenshot of a text she sent to her boyfriend.
Kennedy reported that she and her friends also noticed what appeared to be "pee stains" on the duvets on some of the beds, and that the "N-word" had been written "in the fog on the mirror" in the bathroom. That's all bad enough, but then to have hidden cameras on top of it all? Kennedy told her followers that she and her friends were legitimately scared that the Airbnb owner was watching them dismantle the camera and would "come and get us."
Finding hidden cameras in an Airbnb or hotel is common, but there are ways to detect them.
People placing hidden cameras in private areas seems to be an increasingly common problem, especially in Airbnbs. But people have also found hidden cameras in hotel rooms, and one woman even found one in her workplace bathroom — and under her desk.
Even more shocking, hidden cameras and audio recording devices are actually allowed by Airbnb, so long as they are disclosed and kept only in "common areas" and not in bedrooms or bathrooms. So read the fine print before you agree to stay!
Fortunately, there are easy ways to spot hidden cameras in an Airbnb or hotel room, the most popular of which is the "flashlight test" that Kennedy's friend did — turning off the lights in each room and scanning the Airbnb with a flashlight or laser pointer while watching for reflections that indicate the light has landed on a camera lens.
There are also devices and apps that will help detect hidden cameras, like RF detectors that can pick up signals from certain types of cameras, and software that will tell you if cameras are connected to the Airbnb's wifi.
Of course, that's cold comfort after realizing you've already been filmed, like Kennedy and her friends. They told Canada's CTV news network that they feel "violated" and plan to press charges once the Royal Canadian Mounted Police finish their investigation.
As Kennedy put it in her video, "The moral of the story is, always check your outlets for cameras at your Airbnb and always listen to your super paranoid friends." Be careful out there!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers crime, social media and human interest topics.