Jump to content

Welcome to Geeks to Go - Register now for FREE

Need help with your computer or device? Want to learn new tech skills? You're in the right place!
Geeks to Go is a friendly community of tech experts who can solve any problem you have. Just create a free account and post your question. Our volunteers will reply quickly and guide you through the steps. Don't let tech troubles stop you. Join Geeks to Go now and get the support you need!

How it Works Create Account
Photo

Locate stolen laptop/pc using Dropbox


  • Please log in to reply

#1
im.a.malware

im.a.malware

    New Member

  • Member
  • Pip
  • 3 posts

Last February my laptop was stolen from my Brooklyn apartment. We went through the motions of filing out a report and having detectives come to the house. I gave the police all of the serial numbers, etc. and of course, nothing came back.
A few days ago I was playing around on the Dropbox site - I use the desktop and mobile applications a lot, but don't interact with the site as much. While I was clicking around, I found the My Computers tab on the Account page which lists all of my devices AND their last logged IP. My stolen computer was still in the list along with its last known IP.

I stupidly didn't password protect my old laptop, so once the thief powered up and got online Dropbox kicked in and captured their IP. I then took that address and entered it into a few websites which gave me an approximate location along with a possible latitude and longitude — which turns out to be just down the street.

What's my recourse for something like this? Is this valuable information for the police to have? I'm not sure if am going to pursue this any further since I would imagine it would
require the police to get a warrant from Earthlink or TimeWarner to oust the specific address, but [bleep] would I love to have that laptop back.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5785518/use-dropbox-to-get-back-your-stolen-computer
  • 0

Advertisements







Similar Topics

0 user(s) are reading this topic

0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users

As Featured On:

Microsoft Yahoo BBC MSN PC Magazine Washington Post HP