No one likes a thief who gets away with stolen items and especially not 8 year old Landon Crabtree. After a burglar broke into his family’s house to get away with the family’s iPad and a few other items, the family got insurance money for the lost goods. But Landon wasn’t going to stand for someone else having his iPad and used Apple’s free Find my iPhone to recover the iPad. However, that’s not the only thing police found.
What’s the point of robbing your local 7/11 and going to prison in exchange for a quick $200 when you can just drive uptown, pull a heist on the Apple Store, and walk out with every Apple device? At least, that’s the thinking of some thieves lately and Apple Store robberies have started to become more frequent over the past few years.
Early on the morning of January 3rd, six armed teenagers broke into the Apple Store at Scottsdale Quarter by shattering the front glass. The crew made quick work of the store and stole between $70,000 – $80,000 worth of merchandise. The burglary occurred before business hours and fortunately no one was harmed. Spotting the thieves as they were fleeing the scene, a local cab driver followed their vehicle down the street. Noticing the trailing cab, the thieves fired two shots at the cab, but both missed and the cab driver was uninjured.
Happy Children with Recovered Gifts (photo: L.A. County Sheriff Department)
A potentially sad story of a holiday gone wrong has a happy ending – two actually – thanks to a stolen iPad and some efficient police work. A homeowner in southern California heard some noises in his home at 3:30AM on Christmas Eve, only to find that the visitor wasn’t Santa.
There are a few red faces over at the Veteran’s Affairs Department headquarters in Washington. The day after they unboxed iPads for a pilot program, one of the tablet computers was already missing.
The iPad had not been issued to an employee and did not have any apps or information loaded on it, according to VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.
It sounds as if the thief seized an opportunity: Baker said that if the iPad had been formatted, the $50 million department-developed cyber security app would’ve been able to find it. The data service plan was cancelled as soon as it was discovered missing. Security footage hasn’t yielded any info about the theft that included another 21 computers.
Blog Next Gov reported the iPads will be loaded with an app of patient records as well as other apps. Those records will be downloaded only by doctors in encrypted form.
The hiccup is a small one in a 1,000 iPad-deployment. Baker said that while there are currently only 500 Apple devices (iPads and iPhones) in use at the VA, he expects the number of iPads to mushroom to a thousand and eventually tens of thousands. The VA has plans to roll out 100,000 tablet computers (Android and Apple) and in line with the U.S. CIO’s recently unveiled “Future First” plan to move to cloud computing.
Of all the Apple stuff I’ve ever owned, only an iPod Mini and my beloved 3rd-Gen iPod and maybe a few stickers have ever been stolen; I consider myself lucky. If MacBook Pros come with slots to keep them locked down, why not the iPad? Griffin says “why not, indeed” with their new TechSafe Case ($80).
This weird guy doesn't know that the MacBook he stole from Josh Kaufman is spying on him.
Joshua Kaufman claims that he recently had his MacBook stolen, and so he did what anyone who was smart enough to follow our guide to recovering your pilfered Mac would do: he logged into his Mac via Hidden and has been secretly snapping photos, taking screenshots and snapping the alleged perp ever since.
