To Catch a Thief

Last week, a local school was burglarized and in the process, some of our work stuff was taken.  One of the items was a laptop computer used for children’s checkin for weekend church services.  The laptop was a very basic setup, with no password to lose.  Just open, automatically connect to the Verizon Mifi wireless 3G card, and you’re on the internet.  No hassles for the volunteers (or a thief).

Once I heard about the theft, I wondered if the computer would get used.  If used, I would at least have the possibility to track it.  I was able to tell that the computer had been used a few hours before, based on the last poll of the monitoring software.  It gave me the last IP address used, so it was at least a start.  An alert was set to email me as soon as the laptop connected to the internet again.

I didn’t have to wait long for the alert as the thief was on again within an hour.  I sent a connection request to the laptop.  I had three potential outcomes from the connection request: (1) Denied by the user (2) Accepted by the user or (3) Automatically accepted because the user stepped away for a moment.  The first request was denied.  As was the second, third, and fourth.  At the fifth request, however, the user’s screen showed up on my screen.  And, the user was using Facebook.  My heart was pounding with dumbfounded excitement!  I couldn’t believe the thief was that stupid, nor could I believe that I could now monitor his online moves.  I could have taken control of the mouse and keyboard, but that would have been easily thwarted by closing the laptop.  My best course of action was to sit back and silently capture screenshots from the user’s Facebook account.  So I did.

Through simply watching the user post and chat on Facebook with his cohorts in the crime, it became easy to gather information on the burglary and who else was involved.  I love this statement from the guy that had my computer:

Turns out, I had plenty of shit on him in the form of his chats, comments on the closed group he and his friends used, his profile, his friends’ profiles, his school…

To lock in the evidence even tighter, we even silently entered the command line of the PC to remotely activate the built-in webcam to ensure that a picture of him using the laptop was captured. Based on my monitoring, he was watching Hot Tub Time Machine via a friend’s Netflix streaming account credentials.

Once I had enough, I printed out the screenshots and made a CD of them as well. I drove down to the police station and met with the detective, practically gift-wrapping the case for him. On the detective’s end, he determined the address based on the info I handed him and knocked on the door of the house. He received permission to search from the parent present and recovered the laptop as well as some of the other items.    Each member of the group was arrested and I will continue to work the legal system until we have full recovery.

Don’t mess with geeks.

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