Here's a new use for the Eye-Fi wireless SD card that we hadn't considered: A virtual private eye. Eye-Fi user Alison DeLauzon lost $1,000 worth of photo gear while on holiday in Florida.

The Eye-Fi SD card, once plugged into your camera, hooks up to the internet and sends your photos to either an online sharing site or directly back to your home machine. In this case it was the latter, and the hapless thief not only sent the precious vacation shots back to Alison's computer, but – according to the email we received from Gadget Lab reader Joe Volat – "pictures [of] the thieves proudly displaying Alison's lifted camera equipment."

"I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras," DeLauzon told Reuters.

This is certainly not the first time that technology has foiled a foolish felon: remember the tattooed man who fell afoul of the auto uploading FlickBooth? But in this case, the thief was extra unlucky. The current generation of Eye-Fi cards need to be preconfigured for each hotspot they access.

In this case, the thief was unlucky enough to stumble across an access point with the exact same SSID and lack of password as one of Alison's regular haunts. We're guessing it was an unsecured hot spot with the default SSID.

Thanks, Joe!