How To Catch a Laptop Thief? 485
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!"
Prey project (Score:5, Interesting)
The other side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Police comments don't make sense. (Score:4, Interesting)
When did Vancouver become part of the US? Did I miss some recent war between the US and Canada?
There is also Vancouver Washington [wikipedia.org]. The article summary doesn't specify which Vancouver this person was visiting; both are reasonably close to Seattle Washington.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually had my business partner on the hunt and we tracked it down to 4th District Vancouver. We also found out that the non-emergency VPD number takes you do a civilian call center. These guys seemed be misinformed about their own laws. So when we connected directly with 4th District, we got a call back from a detective who pulled the case. This happened on Friday. I had already submitted to Slashdot the night before.
Anyone know who to update the submission?
Re:California Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Just had a cop come by the university to discuss this. In California at least, photos like that are not admissible as evidence. They may allow the police to get your laptop back, but if you press charges those photos, keystrokes, etc are going to be thrown out before they ever see the judge.
Don't you have Find My Mac or something like that on MacBooks? I thought logmein was more of a VPN thing.
From experience with friends who've tracked down their laptops and mobile phones, throughout the US the police won't do anything in any circumstance. Even if you track down the identity of the person with your phone/laptop and get pictures of the thief using it, the police will tell you they won't do anything about it. Recovery comes from taking those pictures and then filing a civil suit, and that's not easy.
However, if you have any influence with the police or know someone who does, the picture changes dramatically. With a policeman friend you can probably get it back in a few minutes by driving over to the thief's house with the policeman in uniform to make you more persuasive. Also, it's not that the police aren't allowed to help you once you've got strong evidence, it's that they choose not to do so.
In summary, in my experience photos and IP logs and such will actually let you win in court (the thief won't even have a lawyer, so you don't need to worry about evidence being challenged as long as the judge is sympathetic) but won't get the police to do anything for you.
Re:Too bad you can't .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Violence (Score:3, Interesting)