College student Mark Bao used tech savvy to track down the thief who stole his laptop.
When Mark Bao’s laptop was stolen a few months ago, he took the matter to the police, of course. But the tech-savvy 18-year-old college student also had a few tricks up his sleeve—and ultimately tracked down the thief single-handedly, using nothing but software, social media, and old-fashioned smarts.
Bao, who studies at Bentley University in Massachusetts, returned to his dorm room one day in February to discover that his room had been broken into, and his laptop was gone. There weren’t any obvious clues to who the culprit was. However, Bao used a service called Backblaze to back-up his computer’s data. The program allows remote access, so that users can log in to see what has been recently saved to the computer. As it so happened, the thief had snapped a picture of himself on Photo Booth—and, obviously not one to shy away from the spotlight, he’d even recorded a video of himself dancing.
Bao sent out the video to his friends, and likely could have made a positive identification through his contacts, but it turned out, he didn’t need to wait: The software program also allowed him to see the computer’s recent history, which included the thief’s Facebook page. From there, Bao was able to see his name and contact details. As it turned out, they even had mutual friends.
Bao gave all of the evidence he’d collected to the police, and let them handle the matter. The thief returned the laptop the following day, and sent Bao a Facebook message saying how sorry he was.
Bao has since bought a new laptop, so he plans to sell his old one and donate the proceeds to a fund for relief in Japan. And he’s not angry at the thief.
“I don’t hold grudges because I don’t have time nor patience to,” he told the Daily Mail. “There are more important things in life.”