Laptop Theft Victim Gets Last Laugh By Posting Video Of Badly-Dancing Crook
Laptops and dumb criminals seem to be drawn together like moths to a flame.
I thought the case of the misguided cleaning crew members who were tracked down after being caught video making off with a laptop during ASIS 2010 (a security tradeshow and surveillance cameras, who could have imagined?) was one for the ages.
Mark Bao’s story easily tops that. It all started rather routinely when the18-year-old Massachusetts college student had his high-end MacBook Air stolen a few months ago.
But unlike probably most of us, Bao had previously installed a handy backup program called BackBlaze on the stolen machine. So instead of saying goodbye to the expensive machine forever, BackBlaze continued to back up the contents of the laptop’s hard drive to the cloud where Bao could access the information.
And when Bao recently logged on to the service for the first time since the theft, he hit gold.
“I looked around the files and found that the thief a) didn’t remove the backup service and b) created his own user account on the system,” Bao said.
Along with incriminating evidence such as the alleged thief’s e-mail address, name and Facebook account information, there was a video that Bao immediately uploaded to YouTube with the very apt title “Don’t steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers.”