In this paper, we address the problem of scrambling regions of interest in a video sequence for the purpose of preserving privacy in video surveillance. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is pseudo-randomly flipped during encoding. We address more specifically the two cases of MPEG-4 and Motion JPEG 2000. Simulation results show that the technique can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. Finally, this is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase.