‘They knew what they were doing’: This New York man’s $25K jet ski was stolen off his driveway in broad daylight — and he believes the thieves jammed his security cameras to get away with it

Montalbano, who had just pulled his Sea-Doo personal watercraft out of storage, recently discovered that the $25,000 jet ski was stolen from his driveway in broad daylight. His security cameras should have documented the theft, but as he discovered, three minutes of footage had disappeared.

"You see the Jet Ski for one second, and then all of a sudden, it skips for, like, three minutes and there's nothing,” Montalbano shared with CBS News. “And the Jet Ski is gone, but you don't know how it left.”

However, one camera — the one that’s furthest away from the driveway — did manage to capture the heist. A hooded man wearing a mask and driving a Dodge Durango can be seen hooking up the jet ski’s trailer to the hitch on the truck before driving off with Montalbano’s personal watercraft.

Montalbano believes the thief must have briefly disabled the security cameras near the driveway in order to pull off this brazen theft.

"It's the only thing I can think of," he said. "They had to have been staking it out and known. Because you don't just pull up like that. They knew what they were doing."

How thieves can jam surveillance camera signals

Michael Graziano, a cyber security expert, told CBS News that thieves now have the ability to jam Wi-Fi signals in order to disrupt security video recordings.

"The camera may be working, but because it loses connection with the internet, there's no recording that goes to the cloud," said Graziano.

The Federal Communications Commission has banned the use of devices that jam signals — even law enforcement isn’t allowed to use them — but that hasn’t stopped thieves from using these devices to pull off their heists. Graziano also thinks today’s thieves can make these types of devices at home.

Jamming devices can disrupt video recordings by overloading the Wi-Fi network with a stronger signal, blocking communication between the camera and its recording device. While this doesn’t deactivate a surveillance camera, it does effectively stop the camera from recording what it captures.

Unfortunately, thieves using jamming devices to steal Montalbano’s jet ski isn’t an isolated incident. In fact, a woman in Phoenix, Arizona was almost the victim of a similar type of theft last year.

Kim Komando and her husband were preparing dinner when they noticed two police helicopters flying above and shining lights on their property, according to an article Komando wrote for USA Today. Just a few moments later, the couple spotted members of the Phoenix SWAT team poking around Komando’s property. One of the SWAT team members reportedly yelled out, “yeah, there’s a jammer right here.”

“A SWAT member said, ‘Ma’am, a South American gang is targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next.’” Komando wrote in her article.

And while SWAT managed to find the device before the Komando’s house was robbed, their neighbor just four doors down wasn’t so lucky. That homeowner reportedly got a notification that his security cameras were offline, leading him to think that his internet must have gone down.