How To Catch a Laptop Thief?

First time accepted submitter otaku244 writes "I spent a day in Vancouver this week while working in Seattle. While I enjoyed the area, some Vancouver citizen decided to enjoy my Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I didn't discover this until I was already back at my Seattle hotel. Needless to say, I am quite miffed at the whole experience. Fortunately, I have LogMeIn installed on that machine. I provided the IP address to the VPD, but they say that laws don't allow warrants solely on the physical address tied to an IP. It sounds like the silver bullet is to take a picture of the person using the laptop. The question becomes, how do I convince the guy to run a script that will take a picture of him and smtp it to me? I promise to post pics of the guy if this gets pulled off successfully!"

Well, there is a way to get the police interested.

[medcalf]

Tell the police that you connected to the machine to try to track him down and found that he had downloaded child porn with it. Then, when they bust him and take the computer, you can file a claim with them. Kind of the nuclear option, but I bet it would work.

Re:Hate to say it...

[Zantetsuken]

The OP apparently doesn't even know why he installed LogMeIn in the first place. From the LogMeIn website:

Key Features Remote Control Your Computer Access your desktop from anywhere. Wake-On-LAN Start a sleeping computer on LAN. PC or Mac compatible Anytime, anywhere remote access.

It does this by installing their remote desktop client on the host to remote into, proxies through their servers over regular HTTP / port 80, and also features a web based control/viewer. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia

Users access remote desktops using either the LogMeIn Ignition stand-alone application or a web portal. The web portal requires either an ActiveX plugin for Internet Explorer, or an extension for Firefox (the LogMeIn plug-in for Firefox), or an extension for Safari (the LogMeIn plug-in for Safari), failing that it falls back to requiring Java in order to run a Java program,[3] and failing that it falls back to "a screen-shot based HTML remote control".[4] The web portal also provides status information for the remote computers and, optionally, remote computer management functions.

So he has all the remote desktop capabilities in the world he could want. All he needs to do is setup a script to take photos whenever the lid is opened, and check on the browser cookies to see what web-sites the thief is going to. Even if the Apple camera application doesn't support this, I'm sure there are plenty of F/LOSS camera applications that would.

Basically, he needs to do what this DEFCON hacker did [youtube.com]. Failing all of that, he could provide the S/N and other info to the Vancouver PD and Apple, so that if the thief attempts taking it to an Apple store to have it wiped (and removing LogMeIn by doing so) if they follow their processes and check the S/N, they should see it is a stolen laptop...

Re:Hate to say it...

[retchdog]

there's a backdoor so the hotel doesn't have to jimmy the safe everytime an idiot forgets their password.