Prey: Open source theft recovery [LWN.net]

Prey: Open source theft recovery

Posted Jul 12, 2011 15:03 UTC (Tue) by bredelings (subscriber, #53082)
Parent article: Prey: Open source theft recovery

So, are there any actual examples of lost or stolen devices being recovered this way?

I'm curious about what happens after you (ideally) determine the location of the computer and get the thief's e-mail address and photograph. Is it actually true that you can simply go to the police, and they will make the thief give the computer back to you? I seem to recall vaguely hearing of cases where someone identified the thief, but still couldn't recover their computer.

In short, perhaps this software should be called "Prey: computer locator and thief identifier". Actual recovery of the stolen device is beyond the capabilities of the software. Or is it?

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Prey: Open source theft recovery

Posted Jul 14, 2011 3:34 UTC (Thu) by grg (guest, #76756) [Link]

A few years ago I had a laptop stolen by someone I knew. We lived together in a share house and he took my laptop with him when he moved out. He ignored requests to return it.

When reporting it stolen, I gave the police his full name, his mobile phone number and his Dad's full name and mobile number. As far as I know, they made no attempt to follow this up.

So the moral of the story is: don't bother, if you know where the thief is, "send the boys around" instead.