Techpreneur Gets Stolen MacBook Air Back!

It can be a devastating experience: losing your laptop at the most inopportune of times. It’s an experience that runs really close to home, after my first laptop purchase was swiped for some reason off a coffee shop table, after I foolishly stepped away for a few moments to get a drink of water, on my senior year in college. I believe I need not go into the details of what sort of information was stored in that laptop. Thank heavens for external hard drives.

For 18-year-old Mark Bao, a “technology entrepreneur” and student at Bentley College, having his MacBook Air stolen became an opportunity for him to put his tech-savvy skills to use, as he set out to find the culprit. It did not take long for him to cry over spilled milk (where milk, in this case, equals an Apple MacBook) – he bought a new laptop on the same night that the old one was stolen, and undoubtedly used it to identify the thief.

A feature on PC World shared that Bao used the online backup software BackBlaze, which was installed in his MacBook Air, to look at the browser history of the machine, and track any updates to his hard drive. On March 19, Bao sent out the following Tweet: “Thanks to @Backblaze, I think I might be able to figure out who stole my MacBook Air at college.”

He eventually discovered that the first thing that the thief did to celebrate his new “acquisition” was to take a photo of himself using Photo Booth. Bao then sent the following Tweet: “Wow. The first thing that MacBook thieves do REALLY IS take pictures on Photo Booth. I didn’t think they were that dumb!”

Bao also discovered a video, and traced the culprit’s Facebook page using Safari history. He turned the information over to the police. The thief eventually returned the laptop to the police, and apologized to Bao via Facebook. Since Bao already had a new laptop, he will be selling the lost – and found – MacBook Air, and will donate the proceeds to the Red Cross Japan fund.