The Great Laptop Rescue

For the past three years, I've been writing a column for our sister site, Dealerscope, called the Week in Electronics Retail Crime. I share interesting, often funny stories, culled from the nation's newspapers, wire services and local TV news stations, of electronics-related break-ins, burglaries, embezzlements and more.

There are a few standbys that show up in the column again and again: The Walmart customer who used a big box from the sporting goods department to smuggle out dozens of iPods. The customer who stole a TV from one store and tried to return it to another. The sex offender who brought a laptop in to get fixed, leading to the discovery of damning material and his arrest. The cashier who pocketed thousands of dollars, or dozens of TVs, over several months.

Another one I've seen more than once is the tech-savvy computer user who had his laptop stolen, but used a remote-controlled camera to identity the thieves and get his stuff back. One of those showed up in the news last week- and the guy recovering the computers turned out to be an old friend of mine.

Josh Bob, a 30-year-old Internet entrepreneur in the Boston area and a college classmate of mine, had two laptops- one personal, and one business- stolen after his car was broken into near Fenway Park last month. Most people in that situation would check to make sure everything was backed up and the computers were still under warranty. But Bob, after filing a police report, had another idea.

“Having traveled a lot for work, I have this remote login software on all of my computers,” he told me in an interview. “When the thieves turned on the computer, I was able to also log in remotely, and see exactly what they were doing on the screen.”

Using his computer at home, Bob saw that the laptops had been taken by a family, members of which were using the machine to watch wrestling videos and “Scooby Doo” cartoons. Then, another time, Bob saw them logging into Facebook- letting Bob know the name and IP address of the people who stole his stuff.

Police were notified, they found the family's street address, and the computers were taken and returned to their rightful owner. The father of the family, a cab driver, claimed that the computers had been given to him by a fare, in lieu of ability to pay. The police have told Bob that the investigation is ongoing.

Bob runs a business called Textaurant, which works with restaurants to provide text messages to notify their customers when their tables are ready. The company's purpose is to “enhance the experience of patrons before, during, and after the dining experience,” and Bob had left some work-related material on the computers.  The thieves had wiped out the hard drive of one of the computers, but most of it had been backed up, Bob said.

Throughout the quest to the get the computers back, Bob discussed the case on Twitter and Facebook, and later posted both information about the case – and the surveillance videos themselves- to his blog at JoshBob.com. The story was also picked up by a Boston area media aggregator called UniversalHub, and Bob's case was then reported in the Boston Herald and on multiple local news stations.

And how did Bob track them down? He used a program called TeamViewer, which is available as a free download, in order to allow any user to remotely log into another of their own or their family's computers. Just one more tool in the ongoing war on electronics crime.