How Dropbox Found My Stolen Laptop

Are memes still cool?  Anyway, thought this guy would fit.

I was away at a conference when I got the call from my wife.  It was about 6pm, and my wife and 6-month-old son had just gotten back from a 2-hour play date.  Our apartment door was hanging off its hinges, and our electronics, including my wife’s MacBook, were gone.

Being the average Americans we are, we hadn’t written down any serial numbers.  Being the average 20-somethings we are, we had our lives on our laptops, including all our son’s baby pictures other than the handful we’d put online (and unlike most parents you may know on Facebook, that wasn’t a whole ton). There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and no leads.  Basically, there was no hope, and the police weren’t bashful about saying it.  If only, we lamented, we had installed some kind of tracking software on the laptop! We had renter’s insurance for our stuff, but it wouldn’t replace the pictures or the frustrating lack of justice.

After the painful process of hunting down serial numbers and filing police and insurance reports, we turned to sanitizing our digital lives.  Her laptop auto-signed her in to just about everything, so e-mail and website passwords had to go.  She had Dropbox installed, so we figured we’d clear out the files and deauthorize her old laptop (though I did toy with the idea of planting some honeypot-esque security program in it for a while.  If only I had more free time!)  We got on my computer, Chromed over to dropbox.com, and headed to Dropbox’s security settings.  By now, it was about 4 days post-theft.  Sure enough there in the list of devices was “White MacBook”, most recent activity… 3 hours ago?!  Her laptop was still signed in!

Now, in case you didn’t know this yet, here’s a tip: Dropbox not only tracks the devices that have accessed your account, but shows you the IP address they accessed it from.  Not only had our thief not wiped the hard drive, he/she hadn’t bothered to turn off Dropbox.  (I suppose if they were tech-savvy sorts they probably wouldn’t spend their afternoons bashing in apartment doors). Dropbox was now our secret laptop-tracking software.

A few minutes on Google told me the IP was a local address held by Time Warner Cable.  I called them and asked if they could link their IP addresses to street addresses, and they said they could, at least for a police officer with a subpoena.  Fortunately, I had watched enough Law and Order to know what that was, so I hung up and called the police.  The first guy I talked to didn’t sound too enthused, but we wrote it all down nonetheless.  Then we waited.

Monday we got a call from a detective who sounded a bit more tech-savvy; he had asked to be assigned to our case.  By this time, the IP address had changed, so we gave him both IP addresses and the number to call at Time Warner.  He called us again to say he’d filed the appropriate subpoenas.  Then we waited.

About a week later, our detective told us the subpoena had been served and he’d investigated the address.  It was some auto shop that “didn’t even have internet.” (How that makes any sense I don’t know.  It’d be like getting a call from a number and the phone company tracing it to a barn with no phone.  But hey, I’m no detective).   He was still waiting to hear about the other address, so we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  We checked Dropbox about once a week to make sure the IP address hadn’t changed, and we waited.  Finally, months after we’d given up, we got another call.  The subpoena for the second address had been served, and this time it was residential.  They got a search warrant, and told us they would be going in soon. 

Two days later, they had our laptop, some other gadgets, and an arrest.

A few signatures in a book downtown, and we were headed home with our stuff.  Our pictures and video on the laptop?  All still there.  Our insurance had already payed out and we had already replaced our stuff, so the recovered items are all headed to our insurer.  But not before we save the 10 months of pictures and video we just got back.

Now you might be thinking right now, ‘Wait, what if it was some poor college kid who bought the stuff on craigslist not knowing it was stolen? Poor kid…' Well, the guy had not just my wife’s laptop, but some of our other stuff as well, and more or less confessed to knowing it was stolen.  Given the cost of our stuff, that’s a felony offense of receiving stolen property.  On the other hand, he seems to be keeping quiet about who he bought it all from, so we’ll see where that investigation goes. The detective tells me he also had a very lengthy criminal record and a half-million dollar house, so you can save your sympathy.  Was this the guy who bashed in our door?  Maybe, or maybe not.  But whether we caught the burglar or just a partner in crime, it feels good to have a little justice in the morning.