A Victim’s Story: The Stolen Laptop Blues

Thief had financial “road map” in a matter of minutes

May 2009

“There was only one guy who could have done it,” Devin said, remembering the quiet, unobtrusive man who sat for 45 minutes in the café’s walled-in patio, nursing a Budweiser. “He blended into the background,” added Devin, a 31-year-old musician and drum instructor. “He was just like furniture—part of the situation when I got there.”

Devin had come to the café, located in Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, to keep his girlfriend Kristin company while as she waited for her bus. She was returning to her small New England college after spending the weekend with her parents and Devin. Kristin missed the bus she’d wanted, and now they had three hours to kill before the next one.

Devin (whose identity we’ve protected at his request) agreed to watch Kristin’s belongings as she headed to a nearby ATM. One of her bags contained clothes and toiletries, the other her laptop computer.

Since the patio was accessible only to paying customers, and there was only the one man (the one drinking a beer) sitting out there already, Devin wasn’t too worried. As he sat on a stool with his back to the bags, and the man, Devin’s mind began to drift. “I’m maybe two or three feet away from [the bags]. They’re kind of behind me, sort of in my peripheral vision but pretty much behind me,” Devin said. “She’s gone like three minutes at most. I’m just zoned out, not really paying attention.”

When Kristin returned, she noticed her laptop bag was missing. So was Mr. Budweiser. Devin immediately headed outside to find a police officer. “They come in and they bring us to a police station to take a police report. Then, they do a walk-through, where they’re on their radios with everyone. I don’t even remember what the guy looked like,” Devin said. “Only that he was wearing a leather jacket.” Kristin also gave the best description she could, but by the time police canvassed the Port Authority terminal, there was no suspect in sight.

“It’s an interesting look at the psychology of trust,” Devin concedes. “I wasn’t that worried about him because he was already there.”

Unsurprisingly, laptops are high-value targets for thieves. According to IT research company Gartner Inc., one laptop is snatched every 53 seconds in the United States. A recent study commissioned by Dell found that up to 12,000 laptops go missing each week at airports alone. The really bad news? Approximately 97 percent of missing laptops are never recovered. Devin and Kristin, like many others, were forced to do damage control. 

As the on-the-scene police investigation failed to turn up any suspects, Devin’s immediate worry was that the thief or one of his associates might try to break into Kristin’s parents’ house. The laptop bag contained the keys to the home as well as Kristin’s passport, which included her home address among her emergency contact information. “Looking back, that was kind of stupid,” Devin said of his initial fears. “This guy’s not that kind of criminal.”

That is to say, this criminal had more ambitious goals—namely, stealing Kristin’s personal information to commit identity fraud. Because Kristin’s computer was not password-protected and much of her login information to various web accounts, including email, was automatically stored by her browser, her laptop was like a road map of her financial life. Within two days of the laptop theft, somebody who had obtained credit-card information from Kristin’s computer attempted to purchase a ticket for the Long Island Railroad. That attempt was unsuccessful, Kristin says, because the suspect had failed to include the proper expiration date on a counterfeit credit card he’d pressed using her number. Kristin’s credit card company flagged that transaction as suspicious and called her. She said she believes somebody obtained her information from an airline site, for which her username and password were stored in her browser.

Unfortunately, the problems posed by Kristin’s stolen laptop extended to Devin’s parents in Michigan. Months earlier, Devin had used one of his parents’ credit cards to purchase a plane ticket, conducting the transaction with Kristin’s laptop. Somebody managed to retrieve that number and had begun using it to make several minor purchases around New York City—a few dollars at a coffee shop, and a $4 purchase at a department store, for example. When Devin investigated, he discovered that someone had changed his parents’ mailing address (a move likely intended to ensure that credit card statements with suspicious charges would escape their attention), and transferred debt from two other credit cards onto the card they’d commandeered.

Things have settled down for the time being. Kristin’s and Devin’s parents have all changed their existing account information and placed fraud alerts on their credit files. Still, the fact that the thieves have access to Kristin’s Social Security number, which she had typed on several college application essays and then saved on her hard drive, makes Kristin uncomfortable. There are also many photos of her family and friends. “That’s what I’m mostly weirded out, about because I’ve taken care of all the identity theft protection stuff,” she says. 

Kristin subscribed to a credit monitoring service and is hoping her bout with identity-related fraud has run its course. “You don’t realize how much damage somebody can do if they know what they are doing,” Kristin says. “There is so much personal stuff on computers … I really took it for granted before. You can access public records online now. All you need to steal someone’s identity is a wallet—a Social Security number and something in their public records. I’m compulsive about backing stuff up now and keeping my hard drive bare.”

Services like MyLaptopGPS—which track laptops using GPS technology, remove sensitive files, and return them safely to their rightful owners—have emerged as a response to the persistent missing laptop problem.

Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., offers consumers tips to minimize missing laptop fallout:

    * Back up your system. This will ensure that you have a copy of all files, photos, songs, videos, etc., stored on your machine. Backups should be performed regularly, especially for those who are constantly adding new content.
    * Don’t store confidential information like bank-account numbers, Social Security numbers, passwords, etc. If you do, store them in an encrypted directory.  There are many free tools available on the web.
    * Password-protect your laptop. Use a strong password that contains at least 8 characters with a few upper case characters, numbers and symbols. Make sure to memorize this password and don’t store a backup copy on your machine.
    * If you want to take it another step further, encrypt your hard drive. Again, there are commercial and free tools available.

      Meanwhile, Devin’s run-in with a laptop thief has helped him appreciate the silent threat posed by non-violent crime. “He just blended into the background. I was not vigilant,” Devin says.