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

Comments

RIAA

[the eric conspiracy]

Your best hope is that now that you have the IP you can hack into the laptop and install a BT server with lots of nice pop music and videos. Then report the sharing site to the RIAA and watch them take this sucka down.

Re:RIAA

[arpy]

Yeah - watch out for these dodgy people!

Re:good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Bummer. Wouldn't hold out much hope for the Creedence, either. :-(

Re:Good luck

[kfg]

I know it was the Bahamas but isn't that technically part of the US?

Yeah, but only in the same sense that Cuba and Panama are technically part of the US. Something about being independant nations makes them pissy about our law enforcement mucking around inside their borders for some reason.

Hell, Cuba and Panama have been know to shoot at mainland cops. What's with that?

KFG

Re:Nothing new

[Gordonjcp]

My flatmate had his car stolen - an eight-year-old white Rover 820 (looked a bit like a police car, 'cos they used to use those round here for the plodmobiles). We got a call from the police three days later - it had turned up abandoned across the gates of some playing fields in a less-reputable part of town. The clutch had failed, which was on the way out when it was stolen, and obviously they'd just left it. The usual thing is to torch abandoned stolen cars, but they hadn't done that. However, it had been cleaned meticulously inside and out - even down to blacking the tyres and polishing the alloys. It looked like new. It even had a nearly-full tank of petrol.

Never ever did get to the bottom of that one.

CrimeStoppers

[Max Threshold]

Call in a tip to CrimeStoppers. Not only will the cops get to feel like they're playing detective and actually do something about it, but maybe you'll get a reward for it.

Re:Media

[k_187]

yeah, verizon does this for the NSA its bad. but they do it so you can get a laptop back and they're the Good guys? Yay slashthink ;)