Epic Alarm - False Alarm

If you received a "crash and smash" alert, but your property was not broken into, please continue reading this article and feel free to contact our customer success team for further assistance. To learn more about what a "crash & smash" signal is, please refer to this article.

If you were notified via email, in-app notification or by a Epic Alarm team member of a possible crash & smash” event, triggered an alarm notification. Looking at history, it appears that the front door was opened while the panel was armed. However, our monitoring station never received a signal from the panel regarding either a disarm or an alarm (these would be signals that our monitoring station is expecting to receive after the door opened)

If our monitoring station receives a signal showing entry delay started, but no disarm or alarm signal afterward, it is treated as a possible Crash and Smash of the system, which is handled as an alarm. In this scenario, the alarm.com software algorithm assumes the panel has been ripped of the wall or otherwise disabled by an intruder.

Some troubleshooting steps would be to check the signal strength. The panel’s signal strength is very low and is the likely culprit in this case. The panel’s signalling was too low to send the necessary signal to our monitoring station, hence triggering the algorithm. This would also account for the comm error messages you started receiving.

Our Epic Alarm customer success team is always available to help remotely troubleshoot and test the system and also schedule a technician to come out and do testing on site if needed (service call charges will apply). Please note, low signal strength may be due to a lack of having the most recent cell upgrade (for example upgrading to a LTE module from a 3G module, please see this article for more information.