Slashdot Mirror
Best Way To Get Back a Stolen Computer?
davidphogan74 writes "I have some stolen computers checking in with a server we have (software pre-loaded), and I have full access to the systems. What's the best way to deal with this situation? The local police (to the theft) have been contacted several times and seem to be clueless. I personally have no financial interest in these computers, I just don't like atom-thieves. What's the best way to handle knowing the IPs, email addresses, MySpace sites, the Google login, etc. when working with law enforcement? The officer I spoke with (who genuinely seemed to care) didn't know an IP address from a mailing address, so I called others. Nobody cared. Anyone have any ideas?"
You need Snake Plissken.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
to Goatse?
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
The ISP can tell you who is at an IP address, and from that, you can find your computers.
Become a cop and solve it yourself.
See what this guy did with his irrigation controller:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/04/1228208
- Ismo
Try explaining it to a cop as being like a stolen phone? You have the equivalent of its phone number and need police to ask the phone company to look up the location of the stolen property?
confidential data such as that can only be obtained with a court order ... unless you're sneaky and can somehow convince tech support or a CSR to give you the information.
You may want to escalate the matter to a different law enforcement agency, such as the FBI. They should be more responsive to this sort of thing, especially if you describe it as data theft, rather than property theft, as surely your company's computers that were stolen were loaded with company data.
If you live in a small county with elected/appointed law enforcement agents, perhaps you should raise this issue the next time they're up for re-election. If you live in a larger city, perhaps you should contact your city councilor about the issue and request that your city's police force be modernized for the 21st century.
You should avoid doing anything yourself, as you can land yourself in legal trouble. If you insist on doing something yourself, get legal advice first to ensure you aren't going to cause more trouble for yourself in the process.
Something similiar to: http://www.xkcd.com/440/
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
If the police will not help you then set it to up/download dubious content. They will be round like a shot. You might get nicked visiting a FBI kiddie-porn honey trap during your research for this though...
Maybe try the RIAA. Claim that it has downloaded an Amy Winehouse track or something like that.
Or make the computers send a death threat to each member of the congress and executive office (including the candidates) then the FBI moves in, and at the impounded auction you can buy it back for pennies on the dollar.
Call the cops back, tell them not to worry about following up the theft, as you just went around and shot the thief.
See how fast they scuttle ;)
If you have monitoring software on the computer, just wait until they do some sort of financial transaction using the company machine.
Then just use the info to order a few dozen more PC's at their expense, and send them an email saying you won't tell if they won't.
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
And we handle this regularly. The department local to where the thefts occurred should have been notified in the first place and a police report filed. If you've done that, there will be an officer associated with that report. Get in touch with him/her directly with the information you have. If you can't, find out who the detectives are for that PD and get in touch with them. If you can gather any and all information you've got regarding IP addresses, etc., put it all together before getting in touch.
/. stories regarding people in your situation tracking down stolen computers. You might try searching for those or Google articles and blogs about the steps folks have taken when facing lackluster police response.
Unfortunately, if they're not remotely tech savvy and/or simply afraid of technology, it may take some prodding. Most state police agencies have teams specifically tasked with this sort of thing, so it may be that you have to contact your state's police for help.
When you bring any documentation, also make sure you have estimated costs of all the hardware. That will sometimes help get people's attention, being able to say it's X number of dollars. Not saying it's right, but much of the time you run into departments who won't pay much attention to "petty" thefts, but will take notice of $2000 or more. There have been a number of
Or make the computers send a death threat to each member of the congress and executive office (including the candidates)...
I've got to admit that this appeals to me. Just don't sign it "Osama" or mention WMDs... It seems there are some things they're just not interested in finding. [g]
As with any civil case, the police are not going to be a driving force to pursue a theft
FYI Theft is criminal, not civil, how serious depends on the dollar amount. Most thefts under $1000 are misdemeanors, over that is felony theft and these crimes are certainly under the pervue of your local and state police (unless its interstate, in which cases the FBI has jurisdiction).
The Admin and the Engineer
I'll tell you what worked for me when my laptop was stolen in grad school with my thesis on it and my laptop "phoned home" with screen shots of the desktop and the ip addresses it was connecting from.
Setup a fake myspace page with pictures of a cute girl. Friend the dumbass thief, flirt awhile, and then get them to come out on a "date". When you finally meet up with them, bring a few of your own friends with any weapon you deem necessary. Once you meet them and they figure out what is going on, tell them how you found them and let them know if you don't get your property back you will do damage with whatever weapon you chose to bring.
In my case the guy who stole my laptop passed out when he was confronted (very pathetic) and we had to wait for him to wake up. When he woke back up he was still so confused and frightened by how we tracked him down that he gave me twice what the laptop was worth just so we wouldn't call the cops on him because it would ruin his chances at becoming a doctor (apparently he was a med student).
Some people don't like vigilante justice but from what I've seen in the past from my own experience and the experience of my friends and acquaintances, the cops aren't very good at recovering stolen property and I'm not rolling in enough money to be robbed and just shrug it off.
Posted anonymous for the obvious reasons.
What you need to do here is to contact a specialist computer crimes department. This will not be a new situation to them and they will recognize the fact that there is a very high probability of an arrest and recovery of the stolen goods.
The first thing to do would be to find out if the computers were officially reported stolen. If so you need to report the development to the police force where the theft was reported. Otherwise make out a report.
Once a report is made it counts on their local statistics and the police have to take it seriously - we are talking about several thousand dollars here.
There may not be a computer crimes dept on your local force but they should certainly have access to those resources. Find out which force is responsible for investigating kiddie porn - those guys would usually pretty much prefer to be doing anything else for a change, after a short while its like shooting fish in a barrel.
You can certainly help by collecting as much information as possible. For example, log the IP addresses that the machines are using. Then use reverse DNS lookup to find the ISP.
If you still can't get anywhere, contact me at hallam@dotfuturemanifesto.com and I can pass the issue on to folk I know. They may not be able to help you direct but they will know someone who can.
The reason that so much time and effort is poured into investigating kiddie porn rather than bank fraud is not simply the nature of the crime. Its the fact that they have a defined process that delivers highly predictable results. If we could design a process for delivering collars in phishing fraud we would have no difficulty making it a higher police priority.
It seems to me that this is an area where we can easily set up a predictable recovery process that delivers collars.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You then run the risk of alerting the thieves that the systems are remotely accessible. This might prompt them to re-format and re-install which loses you the ability of remote access.
If it was me, I'd be installing keystroke loggers and seeing what kinds of information I can capture. Credit cards, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. can give you the ability to inflict deeper wounds than than the cd tray can cause.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you commit credit card fraud with captured numbers, but you could submit those credit card numbers to a newsgroup on the net read by people that would be more than happy to commit the fraud for you.
Heh, steal a computer and destroy your credit rating. All of their friends in the address book get spammed to death, their email accounts are suspended for spam. Capture a phone number, submit it to companies that will try to sell them crap during dinner. You get the idea.
Why annoy, when you can inflict real and lasting damage.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Then befriend the thief over a couple weeks and get all the personal info you can (phone #, maybe even address, etc..)
Then just call the cops with a physical address and tell them the person committed grand theft of company property, and that you suspect they have the stolen property at their residence.
These are thieves. They're likely already using stolen credit card/identities. Taking that data and posting it publicly would probably just harm an innocent person.
The police are really clueless when it comnes to this as well as cyber crime.
A few years ago a had a debit card number stolen from a site where I purchased a CD. All of a sudden we started seeing odd charges (for body piercing jewelery). Within 24 hours, I had contacted the places where the purchases were made and had the person's name, home address, and home phone number. I did nothing illegal since he had put my name on the orders as the person paying the bill. I managed to get most of the money refunded to my account in a day but the police did NOTHING.
The bank still insisted that I fill out a theft report - which the cops did even they didn't quite understand why. I gave them the information when I filled out the report and they were kinda stumped what to actually do about it.
So this seems to be the norm (not having cops understand what to do with technology).
UPS Sucks
Police have two criteria in setting their priorities. The first and least important is the priority placed on the crime itself. Theft of goods worth $1000 or more ranks pretty highly, second only to violent crime.
The second criteria is the probability of an arrest. Here speeding and parking tickets rate at the top of the list.
Computer crime is only low on the list because the probability of an arrest is very low. But these circumstances make an arrest very likely and that changes the priority.
Why so many AC's wanting to diss this particular advice? They couldn't be like computer thieves upset about the risk to their careers?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Turn on the microphone. Turn on the webcam. If you already have their myspace, you probably know what they look like and what town they're in, but this will help you locate them in real time if they are out using the machine at a coffee shop or something. If not, then get the info on the wifi nodes around them and you might be able to pinpoint them with the help of WiGLE.net. Hell, read all their gmail. If you can get a phone number google it to see if you can get a home address. Are you in the states? If you get their name, try their voter database. If they're registered, there will be an address. In a lot of cases, all you'll need to get that info is a birthdate or something similar that you could glean from their myspace page or their emails. If they're stealing laptops, the ner-do-wells may be in the criminal database already, so search there while you're at it. Of course, you could always try phishing as a low grade approach. Pop up a window while they are browsing and tell them they've won a prize and need to enter their mailing address to have it mailed to them. Something believable like a gift card to a local restaurant chain. If they don't buy the scam, you've lost nothing. Either way, there's so many phishers out there online these days they'll never suspect anything... You have their email. Impersonate them. Send out an email to their friend asking for a mailing address so you can send that friend a neat gift. When you get it, send the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition... And if they aren't available, send the local law enforcement to ask the questions.
You seem to live in a world where all thieves are super-thieves and there's a distinct absence of random stupid idiot thieves... must be nice!
They walked off with a computer. That doesn't automatically make them geniuses. If they were, the first thing to do would have been to wipe the disk and start over. There are TONS of phone-home apps on the market, any semi-professional thief would know this.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Another true story: I had a neighbor of my sister that was getting beaten pretty bad,she had a restraining order,but when she would call the cops they would take an average of FOUR HOURS to get there. So I told her to tell the cops when she dialed 911 that she believed he had drugs on him. The cops were there in under THREE MINUTES and then proceeded to get VERY nasty with the guy when they tore his truck apart and didn't find any dope. So I guess the moral of the story is unless it is a crime they want to deal with,you can pretty much forget it. Hey,that might work for you! Tell the cops you have remote access to the box and the suspect was talking about drugs! I bet they go out of their way to get him for you! Have fun! And as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Assuming the people you catch aren't the actual criminals who stole it in the first place, they'd better be prepared to tell you where they got the gear. Accepting stolen property is a crime, too... there's a difference between buying something in a small computer store (where you'll get a receipt, etc) and a guy who's got some machines in a van.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.