“A tech-savvy White Plains woman whose apartment was burglarized solved the crime herself after she was able to log on to her stolen laptop, photograph one of the suspects with it and get photos of another, police said,” Richard Liebson reports for The Journal News.
“Edmon Shahikian, 23, of 13 Cobbling Rock Road, Katonah, and Ian Frias, 20, of 1609 E. 174th St., the Bronx, were picked up at their homes Wednesday night after the victim turned the pictures over to police. The police said they recovered most of the $5,000 worth of electronics stolen in the burglary,” Liebson reports.
“On Tuesday, police said, one of the victims, who works at The Apple Store in The Westchester mall, received a call from a friend asking her if she was online,” Liebson reports. “The victim said no, and was told by the friend that his computer showed her as being logged onto the Internet.”
“At that point, police said, the victim signed onto another computer and used the ‘Back to My Mac‘ program to determine that her stolen MacIntosh laptop indeed was signed onto the Web and that someone was using it to shop online. She then activated the stolen computer’s camera, allowing her to ‘see’ what was in front of the laptop,” Liebson reports.
“At first, police said, she saw only an empty chair. But a short time later, they said, she was able to photograph a man, Shahikian, sitting in front of her stolen laptop. The victim then was able to find photos of Frias using the computer after it had been stolen, police said,” Liebson reports.
“The computer-savvy victim contacted police, gave them the tell-tale photos, and the arrests were made a short time later,” Liebson reports.
“Frias and Shahikian were arrested last year on charges of criminal possession of marijuana, a felony, after police recovered 3 pounds of marijuana worth about $7,500 in a Jeep they were in,” Liebson reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, this modern day Cheech and Chong are criminally stupid. Looks like .Mac paid for itself many times over in this case.
Wouldn’t they have seen her using the camera software to take the photo’s? I’ve never used the back to mac software so I could be wrong. I know when I use Share Screen you can see everything that the other person is doing.
If this story isn’t the best new idea for an Apple ad I don’t know what is.
Well, she worked at the Apple Store . I wonder whether rather than sharing the screen, she used a backdoor method not widely known, to activate a Macbook camera remotely and surreptitiously? Through the Terminal?
We see you. Oh yes we do. Now stop that!
@ Zach:
She might have turned on screen sharing and just taken a screen shot of the window on the computer she was using, rather than taking a photograph with PhotoBooth or iChat. Or these idiots could have been too stupid to notice her taking the picture or controlling the computer.
Zach of course they saw her taking pics. But they’re retards.
@mh
I thought the same thing. How do you gain remote control without the other person knowing??
A third party software called Undercover works extremely well. It is invisible to the thief and takes multiple pics and other info and sends it to the company, then they contact you.
http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/
For this method, never under estimate the stupidity of criminals, one more green light, they had no idea what it meant.
Great story. Good for her.
anthony007 has the right idea … make a Mac ad out of the story. OK, sure, maybe the next mentally deficient clowns who steal a Mac portable or iMac will understand the dangers, but just as likely they’ll say “leave the Mac alone … they can track it”.
Can you see me now?
I hate that a Jeep was made an unwilling accomplice to the crime.
First off, three pounds of pot is now going for $7,500? Move over Frias and Shahikian. I’m changing careers.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” /> If you were selling pot for that much, why would you take to being a common burglar?
Second off, did the victim have her Mac set up to get open access to be remotely operated via Back To My Mac? That makes me wonder if she leaves her front door unlocked too.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> In fact, this whole story sounds kind of suspicious to me, but then I tend to not trust obvious PR stories. Obviously, I don’t know much about .Mac and how you can share stuff back and forth between that and your Macintosh.
Just guessing, but they may have thought that it was just some pop-up advertising and completely ignored it. Then again, if the victim was a big Mac user, she could have moved everything behind the screen.
All she had to do was quickly minimize the Video iChat window, she could view them without her side of the video chat showing on screen.
If it was only the green light, I doubt many people would have noticed.
Orbicule’s software does look interesting too:
http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/
I wonder if spaces works with back to my mac? have photo booth on a separate window taking snaps while the guy does stuff on the main. Also it could be that it opens up a separate session for back to my mac and not use the main window session… I need to play around with it some time.
Also should look at how logging in as someone else would work (say the main account that is logged in all the time, and a second account that’s connected to .Mac and is logged in as well, but in the background) I should play around with this to figure it out for myself.
I still can’t get Back to my Mac to work!! what the hell!
Get a rope. It solves the recidivism problem.
if you had a stolen computer, wouldn’t the first thing you do when you got it would be to wipe all traces of the former owner off of it??
I’m not familiar with Back to My Mac either, but wouldn’t you be able to deactivate that ability??
At this very moment I can remotely see each of you from my laptop. Moon!
We have so many idiotic Internet laws, one could imagine a scenario where she gets arrested for hacking – into her own computer. (ie. “well it’s not her computer anymore!”)
You can have a one-way video iChat. I do that with my two Macs. A TiPB with an iSight is connected at home. And, when I’m at work, I can start a one-way video iChat, automatically to see what’s happening. Of course, you get a small dialog box, which the perp would see saying that you had connected. But if they’re new to the Mac, you’d have time to do what you need to do, before logging off.
Using screensharing, you’d get a little red flashing icon in your menubar, unless you can turn that off.
Sounds like she was able to dig around on the hard drive, because she found pics of the other perp. I imagine they used the photobooth software and took pics of themselves.
@ Rudge…
Truthfully $7500 for 3 pounds of pot is a little on the low side, unless it is dirt weed. It works out to $20 for 1/8th of an ounce. The going rate for good stuff starts at $50 for 1/8th and can go as high as $75
Even if it was at the low end of the ‘good stuff’ spectrum, it would street at $19,200 for 3 pounds.
So yeah, they are pretty much in league with ‘common burglars’
I sort of agree with Grumpus. While I seriously doubt that the victim will actually be arrested for hacking into her own computer, it wouldn’t surprise me if the criminals in this case are allowed to walk free. After all, their constitutional rights were violated by the police, who were acting solely on “unsubstantiated” evidence provided by the victim. I’m not a lawyer. But it seems to me that the criminals might be able to successfully argue that the evidence against them is inadmissible in court. What do all of you think?
No Mercy.
Give them the Death Penalty!