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Tracking Down a Cell Phone Thief
Zone-MR writes "Last Saturday, MoDaCo (the world's largest smartphone community) held a get-together for their forum members. Unfortunately the positive community spirit was soured by an individual who decided to steal one of the charity raffle prizes - a C550 mobile phone. Check out the story of how we tracked the thief down, got the phone back, and secured the thief's place in the interweb's hall-of-shame."
...and a little luck.
While some good detective work was done by the MoDaCo admin(s?), a lot of thanks can be given to chance, because the cultprit was stupid enough to unlock his phone a) from a source well known to MoDaCo and b) from the same IP address. I'm calling it 25% good sleuthing, 75% dumb criminal.
oh the reasons you couldn't steal.. It is worth a laugh.
= 2037&
http://www.longislandpress.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p
...if it weren't for those lousy kids.
Here is the turd making a comment on the thread regarding the event and the missing phone.
t 225214-s15.html
http://www.modaco.com/Event_pictures_and_a_plea_-
What an idiot.
cunt
noun (vulgar slang) 1. a woman's genitals. 2. an unpleasant or stupid person.
You've obviously never heard UKers insult someone before.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Nope. Wikipedia disagrees. But mentions Intarweb as an alternate spelling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interweb
You must be fun at parties.
I assume you are referring to the use of the word "cunt"?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunt : "In British usage it is mainly directed at men, and is considered an insulting swear word."
I feel sorry for all of the people in your life, you probably have some of them fooled into thinking that you're not a judgmental ass.
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
Another slightly more detailed account of the same event:
Detailed Account
Mono, Orange and Microsoft arrived early, and set out all of the stuff for the event... including the raffle prizes. The prizes were, foolishly it seems, laid out in the corner... footballs, kites, goodies and an SPV C550!
We are not entirely sure at which point the phone was stolen... but a number of people witnessed what appeared to be the C550 being wrapped in a cardigan and placed in a bag along with a couple of other items including an Orange football, and a kite that was apparently discarded.
At some point, probably prior to the raffle, the thief or his companion probably left the building, and took the C550 somewhere for safe keeping.
As those present at the event will know, when the theft was discovered, Monolithix (who should be commended for staying calm!) offered the thief every opportunity to return the phone with no comeback, pointing out the phone would be useless anyway as it would be blocked on all UK networks... but nobody came forward. Having spoken to 'cocky', he said he was afraid to come forward.
At this point, there was not a lot more we could do... we liaised with the staff at the Microsoft building, and determined that although there was no CCTV in the room, there was CCTV in the foyer.
On the following Monday, I contacted Orange to ask for the IMEI of the stolen phone so that we could conduct investigations, which Orange duly provided. I also investigated whether we could determine whether the stolen phone had been used with an Orange SIM (99% necessary if the thief unlocks the phone), and Orange confirmed that they could do this, albeit with a 1 week delay. This provided us with one possible avenue... although for Data Protection reasons, pursuing this route would have required the action to be taken with the Police.
I considered it very likely that the thief would have tried to unlock the phone... so armed with the IMEI of the stolen phone... I contacted the key players in the C550 unlock scene, Florin from IMEI-check and zone-mr from SPV-Developers.
Florin confirmed that the phone had not been unlocked with IMEI-check... however zone-mr couldn't confirm immediately, as he only retains an temporary backup of encrypted data from the phone, which he wasn't sure included the IMEI
A couple of hours later, on Monday evening, zone-mr contacted me to let me know he WAS storing the IMEI... and we had a match! Our thief HAD unlocked his C550... at 10:30pm on Saturday in fact! Even better news... careful analysis of the server logs on the spv-developers unlock server gave us the IP address of our thief!
The next step was to find out as much information as possible about the thief. We determined their ISP and some other information, and thought about how to proceed. On an off chance that the thief was foolish enough to unlock the phone from the same connection they used to browse MoDaCo... I checked out the MoDaCo logs, and the MoDaCo sessions table.
Success!
Our thief was logged on, and the logs were full of the IP address in question... all pointing to one user.... COCKY!
Cross matching this address with the Event registration list confirmed that cocky HAD attended the event... and not only that... upon further consultation we determined that cocky was the person that witnesses had cast suspicion on.
The next step was how to decide how to proceed, armed with the evidence that we were sure conclusively led us to our thief. I stayed up late on Monday night and prepared a dossier of evidence, with excerpts from server logs, witness statements etc. to pass to the Police. After a late night... I decided to sleep on it before deciding how to proceed.
Tuesday came, and I decided that I was going to contact the Police... and spoke to both our contacts at Orange, and a contact at Orange security, about how to proceed. As the morning prog
Sunny
Be my Friend
Someone stole my sisters phone in high school (just about a year and a half ago). I just kept sending the phone text messages like:
"This is the Cincinnati Police. This is a stolen phone."
"Cincinnati Bell Telephone Theft Tracking Services - LAST CELL TOWER CONTACTED: #28302"
"THEFT NOTICE: ALL CALLS ARE MONITORED AND RECORDED"
And so forth... The next day she got it back before her first class started. It passed through six hands all with the note: "Return this to Sadie XXXXXXX"
Get your Unix fortune now!