> ...there was no video footage because the camera wasn't connected to a paid subscription, and so the data was overwritten, he said.

I know Wyze and Tapo's security cameras will still cache event recordings onto the MicroSD without a paid subscription. The former will just continuously overwrite fifo style when storage exceeds the card's capacity; should be trivial to recover if they didn't implement CMD32, 33, 38 specifications correctly (or the SD is too old to support those commands).