A mum was horrified after claiming to discover a bloke 'shushing' her baby through a baby monitor bought on Amazon - leaving her fearing her family has been spied on for weeks.
Claire Cummings was baffled when her son Aiden, now two, began waking up terrified and screaming every night at around 2am with seemingly no explanation.
The 25-year-old mum says that over the course of a month, the tot's behaviour completely changed and he was terrified of his own bedroom.
The nurse said she often woke in the night to the sound of a shushing noise coming from Aiden's room early last year but assumed she'd been dreaming.
But Claire and husband Jamie Cummings, 31, were horrified when they discovered she hadn't been imagining the noise as they both heard a male voice shushing Aiden through the Victure Baby Monitor wifi indoor camera.
She fears that her son had been watched for weeks after he woke screaming every night at the same time for a whole month, sometimes pointing at the £19.99 monitor.
The couple set out to catch whoever had been scaring their son by positioning the camera in the living room and monitoring it overnight but the pair gave up before 2am and went to bed.
Consumer magazine Which? claimed it was 'worryingly simple' to gain root access to another model of Victure's cameras, the 1080p, when their researchers tested a series of cameras two years ago.
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Claire, from West Lothian, Scotland, said: "It had been going on for weeks where he'd wake up in the night crying, but not a normal cry, a terrified cry.
"It got to the point where he was too terrified to go in his own room. If you took him to his room he would scream.
"He would scream and point at the monitor. One night I was awake and I thought I heard someone shushing him through the monitor but I thought I was dreaming or had imagined it.
"A few days later I heard it again, a big 'shh' noise. It didn't sound like it could have just been the monitor making a noise, it sounded like a person shushing him, then my son started screaming so I went in and he was terrified."
After Claire unplugged the monitor, Aiden stopped waking in the night and eventually he started to play in his bedroom again.
Claire said: "I feel so guilty that I didn't realise sooner. We unplugged the monitor and within a few weeks he was sleeping again.
"It's a shame we didn't click earlier. We brought it downstairs and tried to stay up to catch whoever was scaring him but we didn't stay up all night then we threw it away.
"We were quite scared ourselves because we'd been changing him in the room. We didn't know what this weirdo had seen.
"It terrifies me to think someone was watching him. I was really upset to think someone could have been watching him and I feel really guilty.
"He'd been upset for weeks and I hadn't clicked.
"We had to get him used to his bedroom again by taking him in during the day and playing with him in there."
Delivery driver Jamie bought the baby monitor when Aiden was born so Claire would be able to watch her son sleeping while she was working.
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Claire said: "We'd heard about it happening to other people but we didn't think it would happen to us.
"The Wi-Fi monitors look really modern and you can watch your child from two different phones at the same time. I could watch my baby sleeping while I was at work.
"We had a password but that didn't make it safer. I don't know how it happened."
Amazon said that third-party sellers are independent businesses and all products offered in their stores must comply with applicable laws and regulations.
The company said they do not allow the sale of internet-connected devices listed with information that may compromise the security of an item (for example, default password information).
The model does not appear to be listed on the online retail giant's website currently.
Victure were contacted for comment.