Stolen Laptop Sends Mystery Pictures from Iran

Laptops, sadly, get stolen every day (at a rate of one every 53 seconds, according to an oft-quoted Gartner study). But not all of those bereft owners get to see the thieves using their machine from 3,000 miles away. Fewer still make a Tumblr out of the situation.

That's apparently what happened to Dom Deltorto, a London-based animator who had his Macbook Pro taken from his flat on February 4. Deltoro had installed Hidden App, a $15 piece of Mac software that lets you track a stolen machine the next time it connects to the Internet. It can send you surreptitious pictures of its new owners from the built-in camera, and let you take screengrabs of what they're doing on the desktop.

It took until late March for the stolen laptop to show up online. When it did, Deltoro was surprised to discover it was in Tehran. There was little police could do other than notify Interpol; Iran isn't the easiest country in the world to recover your stolen gear from.

So Deltoro did what any citizen of the social media world would do: he started a Tumblr called "Dom's laptop is in Iran," devoted to pictures of the laptop's new owners. He found a family playing Jenga, listening to music, and wearing what was likely unintentional headgear (see above). The Tumblr went viral Thursday.

SEE ALSO What To Do If Your Laptop Gets Lost or Stolen

As this story was being written, Deltoro's Tumblr abruptly became password-protected. We're not sure if he's getting a little nervous about all the attention it received, or wary of further exposing the Iranian family — which probably had nothing to do with the theft itself.

(There's a vast black market for laptops in Iran, where imports of computers and smartphones are banned under international sanctions.)

Deltoro isn't the first aggrieved former laptop owner to devote a Tumblr to Hidden App snaps. In 2011, an Oakland designer called Joshua Kaufmann did something similar with a Tumblr called "This guy has my Macbook".

The spy pictures he snapped helped Oakland Police track the suspect, and Kaufmann got his laptop back less than four months after the theft. Deltoro's story seems much less likely to have a happy ending.

Image via Tumblr, Dom Deltoro