"I can tell when he's online and from there I can jump on to my laptop and start watching what he's doing," Stevenson said in a phone interview. "We were watching him for a little while but, because he was logging on at really random times like really late at night, we set up some scripts to capture [screenshots of] what he was doing on the screen every 30 seconds, and that was then uploaded to our server." On top of that, Stevenson installed a keylogger on the laptop "so we were able to log all of his keystrokes and passwords and websites that he visited". Stevenson said it was a few weeks before the user first began browsing the web with the laptop on June 24. The screenshots, seen by this reporter, allegedly showed the thief browsing for porn videos for the first few weeks. He allegedly sourced the racy clips by conducting Google searches for terms such as "porn" and "porn videos".

But Stevenson knew that, if he bided his time, the user would slip up eventually. It wasn't possible to identify him immediately because the stolen laptop did not have a webcam. Towards the end of July, the teen logged in to his Facebook account and, within an hour, he was arrested and charged with the theft, Stevenson said. "From his Facebook account we managed to get his date of birth and school that he went to, and from there we were able to track him down," Stevenson said. This reporter saw the screenshots of the Facebook account but these, along with the alleged thief's name, cannot be revealed for legal reasons. Victoria Police confirmed the incident and said the teen was charged with theft but had yet to face court.

Stevenson said the police told him that, thanks in large part to his detective work, they were able to get the alleged thief to admit to a string of car thefts in the area. He also dobbed in two of his accomplices, Stevenson said. "They [police] weren't impressed with the amount of paper work they had to fill out so I'd say they managed to retrieve quite a lot," he said. Stevenson's high-tech vigilante detective work is one of the first cases of geek justice found in Australia but it follows a string of similar cases overseas. In June, an Apple tool called "Find My iPhone" helped a US iPhone user track down his stolen phone without needing to place a single call to police. In April, a US woman checking her video surveillance system from the internet while she was at work caught four people robbing her house. She was able to watch while 18 officers surrounded the house and nabbed the looters.

Last year in New York, US police arrested two men and recovered almost $6000 worth of stolen computers and electronic devices after the owner of one of the stolen laptops was able to connect remotely to her Apple MacBook and photograph the thief. Similarly, when an engineering student's house was burgled in Philadelphia in March last year, he published the clues on a discussion website and an army of volunteer sleuths were able to track down the thieves and seize back two of the three stolen goods. But Stevenson said such high-tech sleuthing tools weren't always foolproof. "We had another laptop that was stolen over in America but as soon as the cops went to confront the thief they ended up throwing it in the river."