A burglar broke into one of our employees homes and stole a whole bunch of stuff, including his Mac.

What the thief did not realise is that he was about to go through one of the most awkward experiences of his life.



See, all our Macs are installed with theft protection software. So our IT dept simply turned on the theft recovery and it snapped screenshots and pics of the thief for 6 months.



In the end, we ended up with screenshots of everything from his porn habits, to his online gambling addiction, to his Facebook profile and messages he was using to hit on women. It grabbed pics of him semi-naked, in his home. And tracked his vacations and trips around the country.



When we found his email (after month 6) our tech dept then simply created a blog to share the thief's life with the entire world and notified him. Voila.



He returned the Mac immediately. (We then took down the blog)

You can check out some of the interesting posts of the thief's life here. (the more incriminating ones were removed after he returned the Mac, but we left some of the funnier ones as a warning to other thieves and so people can understand what clues to look for to recover a stolen mac).



Note: the security software we used is called 'Prey Anti-Theft'. I recommend it.

http://thiefinkualalumpur.tumblr.com/



===== UPDATE ====



Wasn't expecting this to go so viral so fast. For those who think we were acting too tough, please note this.



#1 The man committed a crime. When he returned the laptop we did not press charges and let him go.



#2 We never made the pics public accept for the few harmless ones here nor did we ever disclose his identity. We simple used the fact that we had these images as leverage to get our employee's laptop back.



#3 We did involve the police but they were too busy to take action. This happened in Malaysia, not the USA where the Police in cities like New York actually have a unit to recover stolen Macs.



#4 Our company does not install this software to spy on employees. We think this would be reprehensible. The employee was the only one who sets and knows the password to turn this on so that he could have the stolen mac send him its coordinates and snap pics of what was happening on screen for recovery



#5 It took 6 months to get it back because it was only around month 6 that the software snapped a screenshot that gave us his email address and thus allowed us to contact him.