An Incredible Stolen Mac Story: This is Why You Should Have a Mac

September 2, 2009 by: My Way

An East Coast man had his house broken into with 2 Macs and one PC stolen, along with some other household items of value.

One of the Macs was a laptop, and our victim bought a new MacBook Pro to replace it, and used a Time Machine backup to restore all his files. The crime was reported to police, who said they had no leads, but there had been a string of similar burglaries in the area for quite some time.

When our victim (we’ll call him Jim) sat down at his replacement laptop last night, he saw one of his missing computers come up as a share via the Back to My Mac feature of MobileMe. He clicked on the share, and explored the files of his stolen machine. You can guess what comes next. Taking a chance, he clicked on screen sharing, and saw that someone was using his Mac, checking lottery numbers on a web page.

Jim didn’t want to take control of the Mac, so he just watched, fascinated. Later, when activity on his missing computer stopped, he went to the network panel and grabbed an IP address, and took a screen shot of it.

This morning, he saw someone applying for a job online using the stolen laptop, and Jim now has the Social Security number, address and phone number used on the job application. Jim speculates it is possible the machine has been sold to someone and that is who was applying for the job. Or it could still be with the crooks.

’Jim’ the victim said he was connected again to his laptop, but no one appeared to be home. He saw an unfamiliar jpeg image on the desktop, and you guessed it, the alleged perp had proudly taken a picture of himself with the built in iSight camera. ‘Jim’ grabbed the pic, and has now forwarded it to his local police department.

It’s kind of amazing that the crooks would know enough to grab a pic from the camera, but not realize they have left the Mac wide open to the features of Back to My Mac.

Hopefully, the police will get in gear, and rescue the stolen computers, and grab the perps. Meanwhile, ‘Jim’ is cautiously considering getting back into his Mac and erasing any files with personal info on them. He just doesn’t want to get caught and spook the thieves.