Hello there,

My friend's laptop was stolen from his office. It's not an expensive one, but he still wants it back of course. The laptop ran windows and I had installed logmein on it so I could help him when he needed help.

Anyhow, through the logmein interface, I can see the laptop online now and can see its ip address. (cogent)

What should I do? Is there any way to get the address from Cogent?

Should I remote login to the laptop? The thief would see that I am in and would probably kill all chances of finding it. I know this is not a linux specific question, but I'm not sure where else to start my search for help.

Thanks

Your first course of action should be to contact Your local police. They have resource that, together with the information you can provide, will help them locate and arrest the thief.

see if you can access the camera & get a mug shot.
- is there any gps software on it, that may give a physical address?.

Cogent probably won't give any info, so you may have to gather your own,
& enough to give to the police - if they are interested enough.

My guess is the current user is some unwitting innocent who thought they had purchased a legitimate secondhand laptop. Theft is a criminal matter that needs to be handled by the professionals, i.e. the police.

Write off the loss and move on with life.

All good advice. I think I will login with logmein and post a message for the new owner. We'll see what happens.

"post a message for the new owner"

Wow!

You will never get your computer back like that.


Call the <explicative> police!

A girl in my town had this similar situation. She led the police using the built in gps (Mac). Crook caught, lots of other stuff in his grubby paws returned to proper owners.

Calling the cops is good and recommended, but that response will vary based upon the technical knowledge of the police. Some departments may have specialized forces for that, others may not have a clue what you're talking about when you give them a bunch of technical information. At that point you'd need to involve a Federal agency, like the FBI, but with regards to a stolen laptop, you're just pissing in the wind at that.

If you can, without alerting the person, log in and see what they've been doing. A mugshot is great (as that can be given to the police), but any kind of documents that they've put on there that show addresses or correspondence is better. Turn over as much of that as you can to the police. Oftentimes, if they're just the person who bought a stolen laptop, they may confess to it on the porch of their home. If they're the average petty thief, they may do so as well.

But if the police refuse to do anything, crowdsource that info. Post it online. Get the word out there. It probably hasn't gone far. If you can get their address, show up asking about the laptop with some friends.