Man reveals how he can break into a security card activated Marriott hotel room with privacy card

Hotel guest reveals how easily he can break into a security card activated Marriott hotel room using only the ‘Do Not Disturb Sign’

  • YouTuber LockPickingLawyer revealed it took only two seconds to open the door
  • He and his wife were in a hotel suite when he noticed the doors were installed improperly, meaning the lock didn’t function correctly 
  • He jiggled the privacy sign in the locking mechanism and the door popped open 
  • The hotel was said to be ‘a large hotel in a major metropolitan city’ 

A new video shows just how easy it can be to pick a locked hotel room door using just a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. 

One of the LockPickingLawyer’s latest videos features the real-life Washington, DC-area attorney revealing that he managed to pick the doors to his locked hotel suite in less than two seconds. 

The 30-something man starts the quick clip by saying that he and his wife had checking into a hotel suite over New Year’s, when he noticed that their double doors weren’t installed properly. 

The LockPickingLawyer revealed that he was able to use his hotel room’s privacy sign to pick the lock of the improperly-stalled door in less than two seconds 

As viewers will later see, there’s a significant gap between the doors and a considerably amount of light shines through. 

LockPickingLawyer then goes on to say that because the doors were installed too far apart from each other, the deadlatch switch doesn’t catch and engage correctly. 

‘Because of that, the door was absurdly easy to open, at least it was when the deadbolt wasn’t secured from the inside,’ he said. 

He then goes on to demonstrate exactly how easy it was for him to gain access to the room. 

Starting with a quick shake of the door handle to prove that the door is actually locked, he then removes the thin plastic privacy sign hanging off the handle and maneuvers it into the door gap. 

Less than two seconds of one-hand poking around with the sign and the door pops open. 

Using just one hand, the real-life attorney slide the card into the latch and popped the door

Using just one hand, the real-life attorney slide the card into the latch and popped the door

The plastic privacy sign that LockPickingLawyer used to jimmy open his hotel suite door

The plastic privacy sign that LockPickingLawyer used to jimmy open his hotel suite door

‘Unfortunately spotting issues like this is a shockingly common occurrence if you know what to look for,’ LockPickingLawyer said, rattling off a list of issues including improperly spaced doors, incorrect strike plates and even locks that were installed backwards or upside down. 

‘These types of installation errors are just inexcusable, especially on a hotel door,’ he said. 

He noted that he reported the issue to hotel staff and that he hopes it’ll be addressed in the near future.   

Although the anonymous YouTuber purposely declined to state which hotel he was staying at, he did mention that it is a ‘large hotel in a major metropolitan area’ and the privacy card he uses is clearly marked with the Marriott brand logo. 

The LockPickingLawyer’s Twitter handle includes the ‘Locksport’ hashtag, which refers to a set of people who like to defeat locks as a hobby. 

Almost all of his YouTube videos — his channel has more than 330,900 subscribers — feature him picking various styles of removable locks, including padlocks and bike locks, which makes this hotel room door video stand out as a PSA of sorts.   

Marriott International recently disclosed that their reservation database was hacked last year, with about 383million guest records being involved in the data breach and about 5.25million unencrypted and 20.3million encrypted passport numbers having been compromised in some fashion, according to USA Today. 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk