Pretty much all of your examples require some level of home surveillance, either neighbors or a good camera system. If you don't have nosey neighbors and don't have alerting cameras, it would be almost trivial to pick a standard lock and place a few small mics or pinhole cameras while the house is empty during work/school hours.

The real deterent here is that nobody cares enough about some random normal person to do this. It's much easier to send email spam to trick a tiny percentage of gullible people into believing it and paying up.