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Rs 9.8 million gone before anyone watched the footage

12 July 2026 · Muhammad Safiullah, CEO, Camsense

Rs 9.8 million was stolen from an ATM in Kharian Cantt. By the time anyone reviewed the footage, the money — and the people who took it — were long gone. The cameras did exactly what they were installed to do: they recorded. What they never did was watch.

This is the flaw at the heart of traditional CCTV in banking. It is passive. It captures everything and monitors nothing in real time, so it turns into evidence for an investigation instead of a defense against the crime. And evidence collected after the cash is gone is a very expensive consolation prize.

By the time the footage is reviewed, the criminals have already fled.

What real-time surveillance AI would have seen

A surveillance AI agent watching the same feeds live doesn't wait for a human to scrub the recording the next morning. It flags the threat as it unfolds and alerts the security team in seconds — while there is still time to respond. For banks and ATM networks, that means catching things like:

• ATM tampering — someone interfering with the machine, card slot, or enclosure.
• After-hours break-ins — movement in a branch or ATM vestibule when no one should be there.
• Customer robberies — an assault or coercion at the machine, detected as it happens.
• Suspicious loitering — a person lingering around an ATM well beyond a normal transaction.

Seconds instead of hours

The difference is the response window. Passive CCTV gives you hours — the time between the incident and whenever someone happens to look. Real-time monitoring gives you seconds, with the incident flagged and the evidence already isolated before police arrive. The same cameras, doing a fundamentally different job.

Pakistan's major banks are sitting on exactly the infrastructure this requires — thousands of ATMs and branches already under camera. The question isn't whether the footage exists. It's whether anyone is watching it in time to matter. The real question for every bank running ATMs today: will real-time surveillance be in place before the next major theft — or after?