Who Scratched the Car?
A Mercedes S400 worth up to one million Yuan was scratched in the parking lot. Who did that? When the car owner went to the property management office for an explanation, he was told that surveillance system broke down at that day. Was it true that there’s no way to find out who did this?
This picture is from the network and not related to the case
Car worth one million scratched and the surveillance system “broke down”
Mr. Wang lives in Chengdu, Sichuan and one morning in 2016 he found that his Mercedes S400 parked in the underground parking garage was covered with scratches. The car was purchased back in 2015 and worth more than one million Yuan, and the scratches made Mr. Wang upset and angry.
In the hope of finding the wrongdoer, Mr. Wang went to the property management office for an explanation. Security of the community claimed that there was no exceptional case during that night, no stranger coming into the parking lot, and that it was probably done by some naughty kid. Mr. Wang was not convinced by this explanation because he parked the car in the lot after 10pm the former night and found it scratched early in the morning, it almost impossible that kids would play in the garage at that time.
When Mr. Wang demanded to watch the surveillance video, he was told that the tape was tampered with and no related video is available. Mr. Wang got suspicious about their excuses and called the police when he found traces of surveillance video deletion.
Recovered surveillance footage uncovered an unexpected person
The policed responded to Mr. Wang’s call, sealed the surveillance hard-drive, and sent it to SalvationDATA to conduct data recovery and judicial forensics.
Pre-examination conducted by SalvationDATA technicians lead to the conclusion that the hard-drive was a Seagate 2TB surveillance dedicated hard-drive with intact outer casing which can be recognized and accessed, and ready for forensics. SalvationDATA VIP (Video Investigation Portable which supports recovering data, processing defected hard-drives, and reorganizing fragments, and has the minoring speed at 6GB/min and extraction speed at 3GB/min for deleted videos and overwritten videos) is used to create image documents, which is the first step of the forensics process. Then scanning and analyzing functions are used to do a full scan and data extraction, after which the deleted surveillance video was fully recovered.
Recovered Surveillance Video Image
Police learned from the recovered video that the wrongdoer of this case is a security guard Li of the community, and Li confessed and explained his motivation with solid evidence. The grudge between Wang and Li began half a year earlier when they argued and Mr Wang’s compliant to the management office caused the losing of one-half of Li’s monthly salary. Li held this grudge and wanted to take vengeance by scratching Wang’s car, after which Li deleted the video without knowing deleted videos can be recovered using high-technology.
Advice from processionals:
Surveillance systems are deployed much more extensively nowadays, and the recorded videos provide valid data, image, or sound, which can be the keys for solving cases. But surveillance system records events non-stop, so data will be erased or overwritten by new data at short intervals because of limited storage capacity of hard drive used.
And recovering erased and overwritten video clips has always been challenging, which requires special attention of pertinent administrative departments.
VIP(Video Investigation Portable)
Platform for carrying VIP
Click HERE to learn more about VIP.
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