Sprung by Facebook: geek justice for 'porn-surfing laptop thief'

An 18-year-old, accused of stealing a laptop in Melbourne, Australia and surfing porn on it, thought he was home free after evading police for two months, but he came undone when he logged on to Facebook.

Fortunately for the victim company, it was a client of Sydney-based managed IT support firm Navigatum, which can connect to and control any client laptop and diagnose technical problems from anywhere. Using remote access software called Kaseya, a Navigatum technician set up an alert so that, whenever the stolen laptop was used to log in to the internet, the software would send him an email.

Navigatum were watching the thief for a little while but, because he was logging on at really random times like really late at night, they 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, the technician installed a keylogger on the laptop so they could log all of his keystrokes and passwords and websites that he visited.

Navigatum said it was a few weeks before the user first began browsing the web with the laptop. The screenshots showed the thief browsing for porn videos for the first few weeks. But the technician 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 2009, the teen logged in to his Facebook account and, within an hour, he was arrested and charged with the theft. From his Facebook account Navigatum got his date of birth and school that he went to, and from there were able to track him down.

Victoria Police confirmed the incident and said the teen was charged with theft. Navigatum said the police told him that, thanks in large part to their detective work; detectives were able to get the alleged thief to admit to a string of car thefts in the area. He also informed on two of his accomplices.