How I retreived my stolen Sager laptop with Dropbox!!!

So a month ago I had my 17 inch Sager with a 780m, 4700mq, 16gb of ram, 500gb evo ssd and 750gb hdd stolen out of my car. They also made off with my 3DS, a couple of games for that, along with paycheck stubs from my job and a few other miscellaneous items.

The day of the theft I had to get something fixed on my car, afterwards I came back home with groceries and lunch with the intentions of heading back to work after eating and within half an hour I came back outside to see that the right passenger door handle of my car was broken off with the door open. As you can imagine it was a really unsettling experience, I was kicking myself for leaving my laptop unattended in my car, which I never do, and for a few days after the theft I was kind of paranoid because it happened right in front of my house and the thief stole a spare car key from the glove compartment. I was also kicking myself because I usually put some type of monitoring software or remote desktop software on my computers, but I carry this thing everywhere with me, school, work, home, etc. So I just never installed anything that would allow me to remotely monitor activity on my computer.

I called the cops after the theft and made a police report and the officer at the scene didn't give me much hope for retrieving my laptop. For the next 24 hours or so I spent a lot of time thinking and looking up any possible way I could monitor some sort of activity on my laptop. And then I came across this article on Life Hacker. Use Dropbox to Locate Your Lost or Stolen Computer

Dropbox! I checked my dropbox account and sure enough, someone had logged onto my computer a few hours after the theft and I had an IP address! I started making phone calls, leaving messages and sending e-mails to the police. Dealing with the police was an exercise in frustration at first. I got a run around by different secretaries, no one of importance was ever available to take my call. I couldn't even get anyone to even write down the IP address and most of these secretaries didn't even know what an IP address was or why it was significant. I finally had one woman that told me I could come to the department and give her my information. Upon arrival that woman wasn't even there and one of the officers that I spoke to told me there was no way they were going to serve a search warrant on someone based on an IP address alone and because the IP address was showing a geolocation that was in another county that was about 2 hours north, their department probably wouldn't even touch it since it was way out of their jurisdiction. I understand the police have limited man power and are dealing with murders, , assault and many other significant crimes other than my laptop, but god, all I felt I needed was for someone to give me 15 minutes of their time.

I left really discouraged and frustrated and decided to just accept my losses and move on. It was a week after the theft by this point, the thief had only logged on the day of the theft and I was getting nowhere with the police. Then I got a knock on my door on a Saturday morning, it was a detective that was assigned my case. He seemed enthusiastic about the possibility of going after the thief with the IP address I gave him and assured me he'd try and get a search warrant. The next day, 10 days after the theft, the thief logged onto my computer, yet again and dropbox logged that it was from the same IP address as the day of the theft. At this point it was just a waiting game as we had to wait for AT&T to respond to the subpoena that the detective issued, a process that takes a couple of weeks apparently.

The thief kept logging into my computer over the next couple of weeks and I kept sending the logs over to the detective. Finally a few days ago I got a call from the detective "I've got your laptop" I was ecstatic. He brought my laptop to my house the next day and explained what had happened. They went to the guys house and served the search warrant. At first they actually didn't find it. The cops had ordered everyone out of the house and interviewed this guys little kids. One of the three little kids told the cops that "daddies work got him a new laptop about a month ago" and the kid showed them where he had put it.

They didn't make any arrests that day because when they interrogated the guy his story was that he didn't steal it from the car. There is a foreclosed house next to mine that is being worked on, apparently he was one of the guys working on that house. His story is that he found it the house, so of course someone else must have stolen it from my car, left it there and he just happened to stumble on it in this foreclosed house they've been working on.

They did dust my car from prints the day of the theft, so I'm still waiting on the results to see if there is a match. And I still never got back my 3DS, which was in my laptop case, or the spare key to my car. So this ordeal is still ongoing and I'm planning on pursuing this low life scum bag to the full extent of the law. But really, at this point, I'm just glad to have my laptop back in one piece.

And to think the guy used my laptop that cost over $2,000 to download a ton of pirated movies and play candy crush on facebook...

 

great news. always good to hear a happy ending.

ive never used dropbox but will look into it now. i use https://preyproject.com/ but thankfully have never had to use it.

i bet you wont leave anything in your car ever again

 

Sounds like an awesome story; I'm glad you got back your stuff! =D. All's well that ends well and all that ^_^. Good luck on getting back your 3DS and stuff and I hope you can prove that he indeed did take your machine.

 

Good job keeping on top of it and watching your drop box. I dont use it either but this may make me start, at least a file or two so I can check it in case.

 

"I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth."

Congrats!

 

Yea I definitely won't be leaving it in the car again lol.

I just hope the poor kid doesn't catch any crap from his old man about that.

 

Yes, let's hope not!

"Tonight at eleven: Child emancipated from abusive home after relinquishing the whereabouts of the laptop his father stole. Father says 'All I wanted to do was play candy crush!!'"

That would be another case for the police entirely.

 

I'd like to think thick computers like my Clevo are less theft-proof than thinner 'mainstream' computers or ultrabooks, just because they're more aesthetically pleasing and also much lighter to carry around. Heh... Thats for the post though, I definitely would want to leave items in the car ever again!

 

I think you should add a single negative to every sentence you just made, because you just said:
"I like thinking that Clevos are more attractive to thieves and I will be glad to leave stuff in my car from now on." and that clearly isn't what you meant right XD

 

Well done op,
Moral of the story - never give up .

Local police here would never assign detective for this crime.
You should buy your detective a case of beer

 

That's all really cool that they managed to track down your laptop & get it back for you, but I am surprised they used their resources to go through that, including searching the guys house, etc. Surprised they did that for a laptop.

 

The cops here in my country are well versed with gadget theft -- because it happens all the time, people here are addicted to selfies and tech vanities!

That aside, i will definitely look into this Dropbox and see how this could prevent a similar situation from happening to my stuff. We do have a story published in the news how this guy stole a relief volunteer's Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, but was tracked and arrested later because the owner's Dropbox received several self-taken photos of himself days later. Talk about dumb criminals.

Dude, i think the moral here is that crimes of opportunity are very real. Having a bunch of gadgets lying around in plain view would tempt anyone to do something crazy.

 

Sadly but in my country this would never happen. Period.
I will just show 2 examples: from most reasonable to less culture one.
1. nobody would ever question kids without parents. That sounds OK to many countries.
2. Detective... for a stolen laptop... who comes to you at home... AND WHO FINALLY BRINGS IT TO YOU?! Police here would just put papers about thief in a closet and that's it. And even if they find laptop somehow they will do it after they find out it's cost and will sell laptop somewhere else. Corruption in my police everywhere.

 

I'd be taking a backup image in case there is potential evidence on the machine and then taking a nuke it from orbit approach to wiping it clean.

 

"It's the only way to be sure." !

 

Especially in the hands of that type yes.

 

No kidding. I couldn't get anything from the police when my "spare" car was stolen, heck I couldn't get anything from them when my wife disappeared. They say they don't like vigilante justice, but if they won't help you then what options do you have? But glad to hear there are some decent success stories nevertheless.

I was taking some classes years back when one of the classmates had his laptop stolen. He had some VPN software or something that would work silently. We logged into his machine and could see the person using the laptop through the webcam. Quite freaky. The thief (female) was logging into facebook or myspace regularly and he was able to get their personal information off of there. He also was able to set the machine so that it wouldn't sleep when the lid was closed just turned off the LCD, so he could work on getting his files off there and deleted from the laptop while they thought the laptop was shut off. He ended up getting a warrant as well and retrieved his laptop. It seems they were part of other crimes as well.

 

You know what? I guess NBR Forum strongly need new "How To Thread" about the way to setting up your laptop to be able to do all that. Really.

 

Great story. Thanks for sharing with us.

 

@Everyone that was surprised that I was able to get to get the police to help me, I think my case came down to a few factors.

1. I live in a fairly populated area with a large enough police force that has a department that focuses solely on property theft.

2. I was fairly persistent during that first week in E-mailing, calling and leaving messages to anyone I could and made a hoopla over the possibility of identity theft and the fact that the thief knew where I lived, where I worked and had a spare key to my car.

3. I got lucky in getting a great detective that was both knowledgeable and assured me he'd go through the lengths of nabbing the thief with the IP address.

I'd imagine if I lived in a more rural area or in a country with a more corrupt police force, I'd have been SOL from the very beginning.

 

Where are you in the world? I take it america? Which state?

 

Yea I live in Florida. Broward County to be exact.

 

You forgot #4: The perpetrators were ignorant and oblivious.

 

Most would be to be fair. The type to rob you like that are never going to be the sharpest tools in the shed.

 

Lawyers, politicians, bankers ... all perfectly legal, of course.

 

Don't rely on software protection, It has no effect once the disk got wiped or cleaned. Fortunately not every thief know this