After nearly 40 years as a cop, it’s not surprising Detective Sergeant Rick Veacock knows where to look for potential trouble. But in the past few years, that’s been in places it once hadn’t occurred to him to look – the bathrooms of hotels, motels and rented baches where sex offenders have used spy cameras to film a pool of oblivious victims.
These days, the first thing he does when arriving at a rental is not to check the view from the window, but the one from a potential voyeur’s camera as he inspects the bathroom.
“Sometimes, there’s soft toys on the shelves, the light fittings look a bit different or the air vent’s got something glistening in it. It’s just common sense and being a little bit nosy.”
Veacock, who’s headed the Auckland City Child Exploitation Team since 2015, estimates the developments in technology that have enabled ever-tinier devices to be placed where most of us would never think to look – inside smoke detectors, air fresheners, light fittings or mirrors – have led to such offending doubling in the past decade.
In April, in the latest case of its kind, Auckland supermarket supply chain manager Micah Fala, 41, was jailed for four years after admitting to secretly filming 22 women and girls as young as 12 over more than a decade with cameras hidden in the bathrooms of homes he had access to.
The government appears to have no plans to ban the devices. However, newly appointed chief victims adviser Ruth Money – who was in court earlier this year as advocate for Fala’s victims – says it might be difficult for legislation to keep up with technology, but that’s no excuse to do nothing.
“Spy cams are used to breach people’s privacy and cause significant and enduring criminal harm, therefore we must legislate against this. Their sale should be controlled and most certainly the use of them should be deterred and punished with tighter criminal and privacy protection. It is irresponsible to sell such devices when the reality is that the seller knows what they would likely be used for.”
Fala bought his cameras online through Trade Me and eBay. A spokesman for Trade Me told The New Zealand Herald the site forbade the cameras from being advertised in a way that implies they could be used illegally.
The Listener asked another online retailer, Spystore.co.nz, whether its name suggested that’s exactly how the cameras they sell are to be used. Among its listings: “Covertly document events in any situation with the Discreet Button Spy Camera. This Full HD hidden camera is essentially invisible, letting you conduct surveillance in any environment imaginable.” That $199 device was sold out. Ironically, so, too, were many devices designed to detect hidden cameras.
The store responded: “While we are aware that some may misuse products for unintended purposes, we unequivocally condemn such behaviour. While the name of our store may not fully capture the essence of our mission, we want to assure you that our primary objective is to empower individuals and businesses to protect what matters most to them.”
Red flags
If the government won’t help and retailers are disinclined to stop selling a profitable product, how do potential victims protect themselves? And who are the voyeurs getting their jollies by watching friends and strangers using the toilet or taking a shower?
Veacock says the first step to exposing the offender will often come down to a gut feeling. “One of the biggest triggers is just people listening to their intuition. That’s how a lot of cases come to us. Females generally have a better intuition than men.” But, he says, people like Fala are masters of manipulation.
For one of his victims – former best friend Angelene Judge, who asked for her name suppression to be lifted – any signs were apparent only in retrospect.
“This is the scary thing,” says Judge. “I knew this guy really, really well and I would have considered him one of my closest friends. He had the key to my house and would house-sit the dog when I went away. There’s nothing that stands out that to me would be a red flag.”
However, she now recalls, that when she stayed in holiday homes his family owned, he would direct her and other female guests to use particular bathrooms.
“There would often be a reason that sounded innocent at the time but in hindsight was a direction; like he’d say, ‘We’ve just got this new shower head in the master ensuite so even though you’re staying on the ground floor you should try out this shower.’”
Sometimes, when he’d been house-sitting, she’d find his toilet bag in the bathroom. “I remember it sitting on the bench and him saying, ‘It’s okay to have this here, I’ll clean it up after, right?’ He had a distinctive ointment jar and another distinctive cologne bottle. I figure one or the other was adapted to be a camera.”
Judge never found any of his cameras, but the experience has made her, too, vigilant whenever she stays in rentals.
“When I stay in a hotel, I rip through it when I first arrive. Soaps, tissue boxes, alarm clocks, remotes all go in a drawer, and I peer into the vents.”
Another victim, Sarah (not her real name), a woman whose husband had known Fala since high school days, says Fala became a disruptor in their marriage, using deliberate tactics to get access to their daughters.
“He always presented himself as trying to help us out. But he caused so much disruption within our marriage – we were always arguing and bickering and he was manipulating these arguments and fights with us that would put him in a position to have more access to the girls. He’d say things like, ‘You guys need to have some time together, why don’t you go away for the weekend and I’ll take [your daughter] to the movies and she can stay over at my place?”
Their two daughters were filmed at Fala’s place, but also at their own home and at holiday homes.
Sarah was also concerned that when he was out with her and her husband, Fala would make sexist comments to him about other women. “Very, derogatory like, ‘Check her out,’ ‘Yeah, I’d do her,’” and would ask her to the movies when her husband was away. “I thought, no, that’s a thing I do with my husband, not you.”
The women he chose to film shared a similar body type, she says. “They are all the same, petite and fair-skinned. He has a clear ideal woman and they all kind of fit within that childlike look.”
Despite having a high-paying job and “coming from money”, Fala always played the “victim card” because he was overweight and had low self-esteem, she says.
“He would always put it across that because he was so overweight, he was never going to have a family, never going to have a partner, never going to have kids. He even said things like he was going to leave everything he had to our children because he would never have children of his own. He victimised himself in every situation.”
Another red flag can be the use of pornography. Sarah’s husband told the Listener Fala had a “left field” addiction to porn but at the time he didn’t think it was that unusual. “He was single and hadn’t had a woman in over 10 years. He would go to the video shop and buy 20 videos. Magazines galore. I wondered later on if he was being blackmailed by the dark web after accessing porn, to provide content. He would get a notification, like police will be notified you have looked up this site and you need to pay $500 and he would pay it.”
He now recalls how often Fala offered to look after their daughters to give him and his wife more time together and how he fomented discord between them to enable that. “He would be feeding her shit about me and then be in my ear feeding me shit about her. Look at it now and it’s like, ‘Wow, you’ve been grooming them this entire time and doing it right underneath my nose.’”
The discovery of Fala’s abuse of the family’s trust was “the first time in my life that violence had come into my spirit. The first time I had this pent-up rage inside me that came to the surface and I had tunnel vision where I just wanted to beat the living crap out of him”.
The lead investigator on the case, Constable Holly Stiles, believes there’s not much the victims could have done to prevent Fala’s offending. “It is easy to talk of red flags now and hindsight is a gift. I’d just say that trusting your gut instincts is so important. Sometimes people don’t want to involve police when doing so could be the first step in some positive action.
She says because the women did not know they were victims, those early conversations with police were “difficult”. “Some women knew they were involved, others did not.”
Fala’s offending first came to light after he fell asleep after an argument with a flatmate, who then went through his unlocked phone and found some of his recordings. That was in 2015. When confronted about it, Fala went to counselling.
But it was only when Judge went to the police in September 2023 and an investigation was launched that Fala was finally stopped. Judge had learnt of the offending from the partner of the man who had seen the footage on his phone.
The fact that he had seen it gave police a greater ability to seize Fala’s laptop and phone – that can’t happen without justification. In the Fala investigation, much of the police work involved identifying the women and girls in the footage and then breaking the news to them that they may have been victims for years without knowing it.
Tracking voyeurs
Although researchers overseas have documented the increasing incidence of voyeurism through spy technology – particularly in South Korea, where it’s been called an epidemic – little is known about the incidence here, apart from the limited number of cases that come to court.
In an as-yet unpublished study, University of Canterbury researchers questioned 476 participants from Australia and New Zealand about how often since the age of 18 they had had sexual thoughts about watching people having sex without their knowledge – albeit a narrower definition of voyeurism.
More than half (58%) reported never, and 20% said rarely, with only 4% saying “often, very often or all the time,” 9% saying “sometimes” and 9% “occasionally”.
They were also asked how often they had taken a sexual picture or video of someone without their knowledge – only 2% admitted doing so.
In a 2021 paper, University of Ontario researchers reported that in South Korea, the number of spy-cam cases, where women were illegally filmed, had grown from 564 in 2007 to 7730 in 2015.
Their paper concluded that “technology-facilitated sexual violence appears to be a widespread phenomenon,” and the harms inflicted on victims could be “long-lasting, far-reaching and highly damaging”.
Money agrees, saying survivors who’ve been secretly filmed are no different to those who have been physically abused.
“Their trauma and the impact of the offending on them are completely aligned because it is sexual offending. It’s got the same characteristics: you’ve been groomed, you’ve been manipulated and you have been violated without consent. Whether the person’s physically touched them or not, their trauma is the same.”
At Canterbury University, Jacinta Cording, a senior lecturer in psychology whose research focuses on prevention and rehabilitation for sexual and family violence offending, says we have no idea of the extent of the problem here. She is about to launch a survey of 10,000 households which will aim, among other things, to estimate the prevalence of engagement in voyeurism and child sexual exploitation.
She says it’s widely debated whether, or how much, a paraphilia (defined as abnormal and unacceptable sexual desires such as voyeurism, paedophilia or fetishism) is “gateway offending” that then escalates to physical sexual abuse.
“It depends on factors such as, are you also using substances? Do you have poor coping strategies for managing emotional distress? Do you have life dissatisfaction?”
She says offenders seem to fall into two main categories: the opportunistic, who might take advantage of spying through open curtains, for example, and others who, like Fala, commit offences “in a much more planned and compulsive way”.
Survivors who’ve been secretly filmed are no different to those who have been physically abused.
A lack of research means it’s difficult to tease apart any differences between contact sex offenders and voyeurs.
International research suggests risk factors include childhood sexual abuse, substance misuse, hypersexuality, emotional dysregulation, poor mental health, external pressures and “maladaptive coping strategies”.
Cording says these can distort a person’s idea of normal sexual behaviour and it’s common for offenders to have poor social skills.
Fala, who some friends described as charismatic, had no such problems socially.
Cording adds that offenders seem to be people who have a hard time accessing appropriate partners. “Or maybe there’s someone in their life that they are sexually attracted to that they don’t have any access to. Some of these people get fixated on people who either aren’t available for a relationship or don’t want to be in a relationship with them, but they pursue them anyway and they use [hidden cameras] as a means of gaining intimate access to them.”
This was the exact scenario in the case of Judge, an Auckland businesswoman, who says Fala had declared his infatuation with her many years earlier.
“I knew as a teenager that I was a girl he had a crush on but I thought it was fleeting. When I turned 18, he gave me a really elaborate gift, a pounamu, for my birthday and left it on my bed with stars sprinkled all over it. At that point I said to him that this is a platonic friendship and is always going to be.”
Just why offenders will resort to secretly filming friends or strangers in intimate situations may seem a mystery when any type of pornography is readily available online. Veacock says, “I think they’ll have to have a sexual preoccupation with their subject group. It’s all part of the masturbatory fantasy. The thought of just about being caught adds to the thrill.”
While Fala started out as purely voyeuristic, his offending escalated to touching – he filmed himself stroking the feet of one of his victims – a girl aged 10 – as she slept.
Offender rehabilitation
Treating offenders like Fala is often targeted at improving their “emotional awareness”.
Stephanie Schnoor is a specialist clinician and senior adviser at South Island-based charitable trust Stop, which treats people who self-refer or are sent by the courts. She says interventions are aimed at helping these people better understand and manage “difficult emotions”, improving relationship skills and finding more “pro-social” ways of meeting their sexual needs. “We also look at things around consent, around boundaries and appropriate, healthy relationships.”
Veacock says evidence shows the devices Fala hid were “placed” rather than installed, often on shelving, behind or obscured by bathroom items, vanities, under clothing or towels. But they were set up to “enable the victim to be captured in full”.
“Fala was opportunistic … placing the recording device in a bathroom just prior to his victims entering, in conjunction with manipulating the situation to ensure his victims would be recordable. The recordings indicate a check of the devices’ capture range was completed by Fala beforehand.”
Veacock hasn’t yet found a hidden spy camera in his searches of motel bathrooms. But after the Fala case, his hunt won’t be stopping any time soon.