Here I am a DJ and producer (VITAMINDEVO) sitting in the middle of the jungle in Costa Rica working hard on new music, learning to Surf relaxing away from the busy world of San Francisco. At this point in our 2 month stay in CR we had 1 break in already, with my dads laptop (didnt have prey on it), both our iPhones (didn’t have prey) and my wacom tablet stolen while we slept. A 2nd robbery attempt a few days later, saw the thieves thwarted off in the middle of the day with machetes, neighbors on quads and police on dirt bikes. In the end we never caught them and we figured they would be crazy to come back, after a barrage of people chasing them into the woods. Well crazy they were, while we were at dinner a few days later, we came back to find the place completely broken into, all the rest of what we had Both our DSLR camera’s, Lenses, Cash and MY Laptop STOLEN!

At this point I immediately snagged a neighbors computer and went to the Prey Project site and initiated the tracking process on my machine. In a way i felt like it was a lost cause, here we are in the middle of the jungle, in a foreign country, with an hour+ radius of only dirt roads surrounding us. No way ill ever see my stuff again.

When the tourist police showed up, they were clueless, barely spoke english, somewhat were laughing the whole time, like it was all some big joke that roughly 10k of gear had simply been taken from us over the course of about 2 weeks. Basic detective work was out the window, there were finger prints everywhere and shoe prints in the ground, but did the cops do anything? nope they just laughed, had me fill out the most worthless document ever and rode away on their dirt bikes into the night leaving a cloud of dust only visible by a later passing car.

I knew the only way I was going to see any of my stuff again was if someone used the laptop… and over time, they did.

Fast forward 2+ weeks, I’m back in the US attempting to get my life back in order when I get a blip on the radar. The first of the images is being updated from my stolen machine! “Someone’s using it mwuahaha!” i stood up and cheered! Now to do something about it. I sent all the data from Prey Project i could to my contact in Costa
Rica, who then contacted the OIJ, which is basically the Costa Rican version of the FBI. Within a day they went on the hunt, the Laptop had shown up about 4+ hours away from where it had been stolen in Nosara.

I then got a Skype call from one of the agents who started chatting with me about how he could see a girl in her house using a mac laptop! I couldn’t believe it, they were giving me a play by play, No police or FBI would ever do that in the US, never. Especially over a laptop. For some reason I guess it was my lucky day, they swiftly snagged the
laptop form the woman’s house, Of course barely even questioning her. No action was ever taken on her apparently, I can only assume she said she bought it from a store.

Regardless the OIJ brought it back to the headquarters about 2hours from where my contact lived. She picked up the laptop and then yet again, we hit another snag. UPS and Fedex shipping won’t allow you to ship Used electronics into
the US from Costa Rica for protection against bomb threats and theft. I had to wait several weeks for a friend to come back from Costa Rica and ship it from Boston to SF.

Days after, it arrived completely intact! They had deleted my username, added new ones, changed it all to spanish, and yet somehow i was able to still track it down and recover!!!! With some backup software I was able to go thru the hard drive and snag deleted Data as well! In the end I got my machine back and its in solid working order.
From SF to Costa Rica to Boston to SF. this machine had a vacation all on its own, and I got to have it back safe and sound. All due to Prey!

A day after my 21st birthday I come home from a friends house at 12:30am. I was woken up by my dad at 7:40am telling me someone broke into my car. I immediately checked where my laptop was hidden and it was missing. I called the police and they arrived after an hour or so. They took my report and even dusted for finger prints. They said they found a few but i knew that some they lifted were my own off the door. I was not hopeful for the prints to return anything and it was looking grim for my laptop as the police had no leads at this point and PREY was not currently installed.

My only hope was that the thief was not smart and had not reformatted my computer. I monitored my remote desktop software hoping that it would come online and I would be able to take it over. I was lucky, because it did. At 1:42pm the day of, the laptop came online. I quickly locked out the thief, got the IP address and began installing PREY.

I was lucky and got PREY installed just before they disconnected the internet and kicked me off. The laptop did not come back on so i had given the police the IP address just in case. 6 days later when I was at school. I received an email from PREY’s automated system telling me the laptop came back on. I got on my phone and looked at the screen shots.

The suspect was signing up for community college. I had their name and address because of prey now. After class I called the police with the updated information and monitored Prey`s activity. The next day the police went out and questioned the suspect. Apparently it was a female who the laptop was given to her by her boyfriend. Couple days later I went down to the police station to get my laptop. The girl did not have anything else, so the police are still investigating to see if i can get the rest of my stuff back and compensation for the window.

So far so good though. I got the most expensive item returned thanks to PREY!

Around 7:00pm two guys with guns in a motorcycle, robbed my phone… As soon as I get home I actived prey in the website and nothing happened… Next day when I checked my email there were 6 Prey reports available and also the configured backup number to receive an SMS with the SIM the guys put on my phone. I went with all the data to the police (and to be fair, I wasn’t really hopeful about recovering my phone, I just did hoping no one else would get robbed by these guys again). 7 days after that, I received a call from the policeman assigned to my case who told me they have my phone and I could get it back whenever I wanted. I was amazed, I never expected to recover it.

Summarizing, you guys and Prey rock!

Thank you so much for creating this program- I truly thought my computer was a goner until, lo-and-behold, the first report came in the next day. The thief was thankfully logged into Facebook at the time and I was able to tell police the full name of the thief and my laptop’s whereabouts.

I was driving when all of a sudden a motorcyclist grabbed my bag that had my MacBook Pro inside. On the day that I received my first report I got really nervous, so I called the Police that was looking at my case and gave them all the information Prey gathered (pictures, location, etc) of the person that had my Mac. The Police immediately went looking for my computer. I think I was the most astonished person to find how Prey works.

When i came back to my office after my lunch break, no more Mac on my desk! I immediately activated Prey but no reports…5 days after, i started receiving some reports showing the exact localisation of my computer (and several pictures of the “new” owner). I called the police and explained everything. The police came to the new owners place and arrested him. I get my MacBook back thanks to Prey and thanks to the police.

Firstly, I apologise for not writing sooner. I had always meant to get around to it!

I got the call from my Mother that our house had been burgled, and left work right away to head back home feeling sick to the stomach. After an initial look around we realised there were thousands of pounds worth of camera’s and equipment, jewelry (Including sentimental and non-replaceable items) electric items and my beloved MacBook. As soon as I noticed the laptop missing, my first thoughts were Prey… I used another computer to login and activate the device as missing and informed the Police Officer who arrived on scene that the laptop may be able to be tracked.

Later on that evening, I received the first email on my phone indicating a report was available for the laptop. The excitement and adrenaline kicked in instantly as I shouted to the other occupants of the house to come quickly! We logged in and were greeted with a pretty clear mugshot of a young woman, a rough location and a screenshot of Facebook with her in the process of filling in her username! We phoned the Police and informed them as to what was happening while we watched further reports being generated. The next ones gave a pretty acurate location, narrowing the houses down to a few and showing her name and email address clearly on Facebook. We could even see a screenshot of her, mid-conversation discussing buying a charger for a laptop she had just got!

Much to my surprise, the Police were very interested and sent a team of officers to the location straight away, and another to our house to check out the details and take a statement. We received word that the officers had arrested the culprit, and seized a number of goods including the laptop all while they were still taking my statement. You can’t ask for much better!

As it turns out, she was only a recipient of the goods, but through her arrest the Police were able to eventually apprehend the burglar and both received punishment, although it was too lenient in my books! :)

My laptop was eventually returned to me by the Police after needing to be kept as evidence, and unfortunately was rather battered and bruised but I was glad to have it back in my posession. It also led to the return of some other cameras and jewelry. The only downside being that the burglar had already got rid of a lot of the Jewelry which was unable to be found.

A big thanks to Prey and the team behind it! Without it, I doubt we would have ever heard anymore. I still keep the reports logged in my account so I can show people just how well it works!

My car got stolen some weeks ago, and at the day I activated Prey. Some days after, I did not even have any hope, That is when the first report came in! When I told the police we waited until it was monday and the investigators would be available, so on monday I spent the hole afternoon talking to the investigator and trying to collect more info about the location (since it was not precisely the location indicated), which was awesome!

Some hours after there were 3 arrests and I got my note back. :)

Catching the thief with his pants down!

At 4 a.m. a thief broke into our office and stole four new laptops (2 MacBooks, 2 Dell pc’s). The alarm went off, but when the night watch and police showed up, the thief was long gone. Fortunately our developers had installed Prey on the stolen laptops, so when a couple of team members arrived around 8 a.m. and realized there had been a break-in, they started to inspect the Prey reports.

We were really lucky. As the thief went home from his nightly activities, he turned on one of the MacBooks and spent the morning watching porn and logging into his Facebook account. We could see that from the Prey screenshots. So you can say the thief literally was caught with his pants down :-)

His Facebook name was unique, so it was easy to find his profile where he shared lot of posing images. At one of the pictures he was actually posing with a table full of silverware – so we thought he might be already known to the police.

The intruder looked like he spends many hours a week in the gym, so we had no urge to confront him without help from the police! So, a couple of hours later, we handed over the name, images, GPS coordinates and IP address to the police. Yes, it sounded like our visitor was known to them.

Around noon we received a phone call from a police officer calling from the thief’s address. All the laptops were recovered and we collected them at 4 p.m. from the police station.

The incident caught some national media attention and we were happy to tell lots of people about Prey. Prey is amazing! Because of Prey, combined with luck, a stupid thief and effective police, the break-in had a happy ending after all.

My dorm room was left open, and someone was able to just walk in and grab my laptop off of my desk. I immediately marked it missing on my Prey profile, and reported it to campus police, and the officer that came to take my statement told me that it’d probably be sold off in Manhattan somewhere. 10 days later, I received a report from Prey, saying my laptop was in the East Village, and gave me a picture of the guy using it. I sent the information to the detective who had been my correspondant in the case, and the day after, he called me in to sign a statement saying I didn’t let anyone use my laptop at that time. I was then shown the man’s picture, as well as his New York State ID, and his address. I was notified a week later by an NYPD detective that my laptop had been recovered, and the guy that had it had been arrested. I picked it up 2 days later. Although all my personal data (notes, music, etc.) was gone, it still felt pretty good to get the laptop back, and hear that justice had caught up to the guy who had it.