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

Re:RIAA

[extremescholar]

What if the person who is currently in possesion of the laptop has no idea it was stolen. He got it from a friend of a friend for a couple hundred bucks.

RE:Great Idea see current Discovery Times MS ad

[callingalloldhippies]

Sat. 8p.m. pac. USA On Discovery Times T.V.
Amazing timeing! Not ten minutes ago I just saw a Dear MicroSoft video of a scribe(user) with feather pen writing a parchment complaint letter re: uninstalls and ? dlls ? that may or may not be needed elsewhere for something I may or may not even have or use. Perfect! wish I remembered if it was for some product or...? Hope someone else saw it. Way too cool!
A smart Company could make good use of an agency that pursued something like this.

MOD PARENT UP.

[LFS.Morpheus]

So sad but true.

Trust these lazy assholes with guns?

[ccmay]

Why bother with an actual crime that will use resources when they can target basically good people for cash?

Pretty comical to think that there are people all over the country, mostly Democrats, who think these lazy pencil pushing jobsworths are the only ones who ought to be trusted with firearms.

-ccm

Re:Trust these lazy assholes with guns?

[Travoltus]

As opposed to Republicans who constantly reward their abysmal incompetence and flagrant negligence with more and more funding...

Re:Media

[Pharmboy]

Why would not posting for half an hour mean I'm using a firewall? I mean, yes I am using a firewall, but why should that even be an issue? This is ridiculous.

The main issue is you are AC, and Slashdot doesn't want AC to post every 10 or 20 minutes, a very good change. Since they changed this rule, the quality of posts as AC has gone up considerably. Also, it appears some IPs can post more often as AC than others, or perhaps there is a randomness to the wait period.

The firewall issue should actually say a firewall/router (or proxy), which would make a big difference if others behind the same firewall/router are posting as AC, since it limits AC by IP address, the only thing it CAN filter by if you are AC.