Slashdot Mirror
Stolen Laptop Calls In! - Will Police Act?
broswell asks: "We rent computer equipment and occasionally our equipment gets stolen. I wrote a little VBS script that calls our webserver every hour (script below) and installed it on our laptops. Sure enough, some laptops went missing. One of the stolen laptops is now calling in from a Verizon Internet account which appears to be in a neighboring town. The Baltimore City Police grudgingly filled out a police report 'so we could collect insurance' but don't seem willing to subpoena Verizon, find the address of the end user, recover tha laptop and prosecute the thief. They seem clueless. The Maryland State police has a computer crimes unit. The have a clue, but they claim they don't have jurisdiction. It is not about the money (our customer signed for the computers and will pay for the stolen items), we just want justice." With all of the necessary information in hand of the proper authorities, how likely is it that the stolen laptop will be recovered?
For those interested, here is the script the laptop used to report itself back to its owners:
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objScriptExec = objShell.Exec("ipconfig /all")
strIpConfig = objScriptExec.StdOut.ReadAll
myvar = "send=" + strIpConfig
do until 0=1
on error resume next
a=HTTPPost("http://www.yourtrackinghost.com/cgi-bin/locator.pl",myvar)
WScript.Sleep 3600000
LOOP
Function HTTPPost(sUrl, sRequest)
set oHTTP = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
oHTTP.open "POST", sUrl,false
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Length", Len(sRequest)
oHTTP.send sRequest
HTTPPost = oHTTP.responseText
End Function
For those interested, here is the script the laptop used to report itself back to its owners:
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objScriptExec = objShell.Exec("ipconfig /all")
strIpConfig = objScriptExec.StdOut.ReadAll
myvar = "send=" + strIpConfig
do until 0=1
on error resume next
a=HTTPPost("http://www.yourtrackinghost.com/cgi-bin/locator.pl",myvar)
WScript.Sleep 3600000
LOOP
Function HTTPPost(sUrl, sRequest)
set oHTTP = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
oHTTP.open "POST", sUrl,false
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Length", Len(sRequest)
oHTTP.send sRequest
HTTPPost = oHTTP.responseText
End Function
A friend of mine had her laptop stolen from her home here in Portland Oregon. She managed to find the laptop listed on E-bay with images of the serial number in plain view. I managed to look in the directory of the webserver the guy was using to host images and found images of lots of stolen goods and the thief himself. She bid on her own laptop got the guys address and called the police. She gave them all of this, his address, the image of the thief, the image of the serial number on ebay, and images of all the other stolen goods, and copies of the original receipts from gateway with the serial number on them. They took a week and a half to get back to her and then said that they didn't get some of the evidence because they couldn't figure out how to check their email...
Eventually (couple of more weeks) after countless phone calls and visits to the police station they did go and repossess her laptop, no charges were ever filed.
Good luck getting police to follow through on anything more complicated than "some culered feller hanging around lookin 'spicous"
They simply lack the capacity to understand technology and the desire to solve any actual crimes.