Undercover recovers MacBook in Norway

Shortly after the family of Petter Røisland (23) moved into their new house in a residential area just outside of Stavanger, the nightmare began. When Petter was about to leave for work on an early morning, he discovered their home had been burgled, and about $7600 worth of material had been stolen, including their computer. Petter then decided to take things into his own hands: he installed Undercover on the two new MacBooks they bought as a replacement, not realizing that this software was going to help him solve a much larger case a few months later...

9 February 2009

"We woke up that morning realizing there had been a theft in our house again. In all the chaos I remembered that I had installed Undercover on the stolen MacBook. I quickly contacted the Undercover recovery center to report the machine as stolen, and I got an email from Orbicule. I confirmed the theft, and about 10 minutes later the machine was marked as stolen and Undercover was activated."

3 April 2009

"Just as we had given up all hope of getting any information from the stolen computer - the police had already closed this case - we received an email from Orbicule. They told me that my machine had been connected to the internet, and that Undercover had transmitted information. First I got the IP address, which Orbicule also shared with the local police and the ISP. The police told me that they would take a look at it, but I was unsure if they would really do it..."

Thanks to the iSight-integration, Undercover could snap pictures of the thief

4 April 2009

"Early this morning I received a new email from Orbicule. This time they received several pictures from the machine. The pictures were in an amazing quality - as if taken with a normal digital camera! They showed four people sitting behind the computer, and there was also a screenshot where one of them wrote his name.After some research I found out that one of these persons was actually the leading drugs dealer in our region. I quickly gathered the pictures and gave them to the local police. About two hours later I got a call from the police asking me to tell them more about Undercover, and how I got these pictures. They told me that one of the persons in the pictures was someone the police had been looking for a long time, and this was highly interesting to them. Over the next days I regularly had contact with Orbicule. I received even more pictures and some quite interesting screenshots with addresses, phone numbers, names, and much more."

Undercover is still the only theft-recovery application to transmit screenshots from the stolen Mac. These screenshots often play a key role in recovery.

10 April 2009

"The police informed me that they had some problems locating the Mac, as the ISP didn't want to provide them information about the location where the machine had been connected to the internet. I sent an email to Orbicule, hoping for more help. Promptly they served me with more time stamps from the stolen Mac. This information was given to the police, and they contacted the ISP again."

13 April 2009

"The police called me to say they had received the necessary information from the ISP, and that they recovered my Mac. They had visited the people that were using my Mac and brought them to the police station. The Mac was available for me to pick up. I quickly sent a thank you email to Orbicule, telling them about the successful case. About an hour later, I received an email in which they congratulated me, and told me that the machine was now no longer marked as stolen. Two hours later I was sitting in front of my Mac, which still had all the data on it I had lost in the theft."

1 May 2009

"Norway's most popular newspaper puts my recovery story on their front page. This story (in Norsk) can be read at http://www.dagbladet.no"