A photographer, John Heller, had $9,000 worth of gear stolen at a shoot in Hollywood. After giving up all hope of ever getting his Nikon D3 back, he checked with a site called GadgetTrak that scans Flickr and other image upload sites for photos matching the serial number of his DSLR.
In a few seconds he had found shots with serial numbers matching his D3 belonging to a professional photographer. With the help of the police he got his gear back and now the tracking service is a recommend site for LAPD detectives on the hunt for fugitive cameras.
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In what could amount to a very hefty haul, Moscow thieves took a sledge to metal security shutters and then a glass case to grab twenty items including a Leica Pro Set with three lenses. Interestingly, they left a $32,000 Leica S2 on the shelf and, not surprisingly, focused mainly on lenses and the familiar standard M9s.
Serial numbers are after the jump if you ever spot these in the wild. → Read More
Thieves in Malaysia managed to drive off in a truck containing 10,800 Western Digital hard drives. Don’t expect to see the drives hit the market though, Malaysian police were able to identify the culprits, as they used to work at the warehouse the drives were stolen from. The Malaysian news site NST reports that the people driving the truck were in fact waved through security after being recognized by the guard on duty as employees. Apparently the guard hadn’t got the memo about the men being fired. [via HardOCP] → Read More
It was only a few days ago that I mentioned that, you know, your data is never secure. So, this story isn’t surprising at all. It turns out that the records of more than 3.3 million student loans were stolen a few days ago. Data stolen includes names, Social Security numbers, and credit card numbers. Awesome. → Read More
Here’s a candidate for the Canadian parent of the year award. Police in Richmond B.C. are looking for a couple that used their kids to load up on over $3000 worth of Blu-ray and DVD discs from Future Shop. The estimate is that the couple took between 80 to 100 movies. → Read More
A young man named Jeremy Gillian stole another young man’s XBox 360 in a robbery and then turned it on… with the network and Gamertag intact. The results are as you’d expect: the victim was able to grab the IP, police tracked it to Gillian’s grandmother’s house, and the XBox and a trove of other stolen stuff were discovered. → Read More
Some Netflix news for you this morning. It looks like a 49-year-old post office worker is facing a maximum of five years in federal prison after having plead guilty to federal theft charges. What was he stealing? Oh, you know, some 3,000 Netflix DVDs over the years. → Read More
A postal service supervisor working at a Minneapolis mail distribution center “has admitted taking nearly 16,000 Best Buy reward certificates and using them to buy almost $200,000 in merchandise” between June 2007 and October 2008, according to the Star Tribune. → Read More
Years ago, I read an article in 2600 describing a system that would track down your stolen laptop. Presumably it was all open source software, I can’t remember. GadgetTrak, which is a company that can track down your stolen gadgets, including Mac/PC, iPhone, BlackBerry, and WinMo phone, has a fun success story that’ll kill a few minutes. → Read More
Flickr Who knew? Apparently would-be thieves have a soft spot for baby photos. A research study conducted in Edinburgh found that lost wallets containing baby photos were returned nine out of ten times. → Read More
Did you know that video game theft costs retailers billions of dollars a year? So says the Entertainment Merchant Association, a group that “advance[s] the interests of the $33 billion home entertainment industry.” That’s actual theft, mind you. Like, you walk into a store, swipe a game, put it under your shirt, then amscray. The solution to this problem? Not to lower the price of video games so that people don’t have to steal, no, but to install some sort of radio-activated lock. Said lock would make the games (or movies) unplayable until they’ve been unlocked at the cash register. → Read More
While I’m sure it’s super fun to stuff your gaming console in your carry-on luggage so it doesn’t get stolen, it’s not all that practical. Yale University student Jesse Maiman found that out the hard way when his Xbox 360 disappeared from his checked luggage on a US Airways flight. → Read More
As the U.S. military gets more and more technical, more and more military laptops are finding their way onto the global black market. It’s not really surprising (well, maybe it is), but it’s possible to buy all sorts of military equipment on the black market. But it’s one thing to buy a rocket propelled grenade to use to shoot at someone; it’s another thing entirely to buy a laptop filled with troop deployment plans, personnel information, and known weaknesses in your opponent’s vehicles. → Read More
Ha! Remember when the Half-Life 2 source code was stolen a few years ago, showing up all over BitTorrent, IRC and the like? It turns out that Valve, once it was able to determine who was responsible (with the help of the FBI), a German fellow by the name of Axel Gembe, attempted to offer him a job! The company offered him the job in order to lure him to the U.S. so he could be arrested. Gembe, perhaps thinking that it was patently ludicrous that the company he just helped screw would want to emply him—you know, to make good use of his elite hacking skills—refused the job. → Read More
If someone asked me to help them steal a gigantic cactus, I’d be like, “Have you ever touched a cactus? Those things are really prickly. Find yourself another cohort, kind sir.” But apparently the giant Saguaro cactus, found mostly in Arizona, can sell for over $1,000 which, in turn, has given rise to a pretty active poaching trade. In order to cut down on such thievery, officials at Arizona’s Saguaro National Park will test the effectiveness of implanting RFID microchips – similar to the ones that people implant in their pets – inside the types of cacti that are getting stolen most often. Park officials will then be able to wave a wand scanner over cacti found in truck beds and even local nurseries to detect whether or not a particular cactus has been stolen. [via Jaunted] → Read More
There was an adorable article in Time magazine last week about Wi-Fi theft. The author, Lev Grossman, admits to being a “Wi-Fi thief” for several years, using his neighbors’ unsecured Wi-Fi without them knowing. He calls it a crime, a direct violation of Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47 of the United States Code. But is that really theft? TechDirt argues that when someone leaves an access point open, they are essentially granting permission to anyone to use it. And if you’ve granted permission, how can someone’s access be unauthorized and illegal? Cracking someone’s WEP (people still use WEP around here) and then using that connection, obviously, is a different story. Bonus points if you have a swashbuckling “I stole teh Wi-Fi!1″ story to share. I tried to crack my neighbor’s WEP a few years ago, which means I was savvy enough to fire up Linux and run AirSnort. Hardcore hacking, in other words. → Read More
To quote Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson, “The most amazing gaming story of the year.” A recently released adventure game for the PC, Limbo of the Lost, appears to have stolen content, including artwork and level design, from games like Oblivion and Silent Hill. The game, developed by Majestic Studios—its [down] Web site is hosted on Geocities!—looks like absolute rubbish, from concept to execution. Like, check out this video: Really, dynamic storyline? Good heavens. → Read More
A couple from Long Island left their camera at a restaurant in Florida where two of the employees found and kept it . The camera contained an Eye-Fi card which automatically found an open wireless base station and began uploading their photos including some photos the thieves had taken of each other. When they contacted the restaurant with the evidence, the camera was returned and the couple declined to press charges, proving that even technologists have a heart. I wonder how much this is going to affect petty theft. With everything enabled for Wi-Fi and cellular, how often will we get our pockets picked when the thieves have no idea how the device is rigged. → Read More
Get this. You know how when you have to confirm your bank account with, say, Paypal or Google Checkout or any number of online services that want to make sure the bank account that they’re going to be depositing money into belongs to you? So you’ll generally receive two small deposits — pennies each — that you’ll have to confirm, right? Well some guy used an automated script to open up around 58,000 accounts with E-Trade and Schwab.com and collected all the little deposits using a handful of bank accounts. When all was said and done, he walked away with around $50,000. The man, Michael Largent of California, also used the technique to nab over $8,000 from Google Checkout. He said he needed the money to pay down some debts. He hasn’t been charged by Google (maybe because Google doesn’t “prohibit multiple e-mail addresses and accounts”) but he’s facing computer, wire, and mail fraud charges for the E-Trade and Schwab stunts. Largent is currently out on bail. via Wired → Read More
