On January 12, 2012, MIW‘s Director of Field Operations, Kyle Wilding, witnessed a laptop robbery where a man ripped an Apple MacBook out of the hands of a woman at a neighborhood Starbucks and ran to a waiting getaway vehicle.

Continued at the bottom…

UPDATE (January 23, 2012)

Kyle received a call from the person he helped a couple weeks ago. The remote wipe of her laptop went through as soon as the criminal connected the laptop to the internet, and a GPS location was emailed to the victim, who called the police.

They caught the guy the same day- coincidence..?

Unfortunately, he had taken apart the entire computer and already had used the parts to Frankenstein other laptops – the serial number Kyle helped her give the police was confirmed to be hers, but the shell was all that was left.

At least her data was safe, unless the guy immediately turned off the computer and used data recovery on the drive. Make It Work will be going out to her house next month to get her new laptop up and running along with setting up bitlocker drive encryption!

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The rest of the story…

Kyle jumped to her rescue and assisted by remotely wiping the data on the MacBook from the victim’s iPhone. He was even able to find the computer’s location for the police officers. Luckily she had iCloud installed and Superhero Kyle around to assist her.

Will you know what to do if this ever happens you?

Here’s the full story from Kyle:

“I was working on my MacBook at a Starbucks in Cypress, and a guy walked right up to the girl sitting across from me and ripped the MacBook she was typing on right out of her hands and ran. He had a driver outside and was gone before anyone could get a license plate.

After the police came and interviewed me, I asked her for her iPhone. Sure enough she had iCloud installed. I queued a remote wipe of her MacBook and sent it to email her when it connected to the Internet so she could get a location for the cops, and even got the serial number.”

This is a perfect example of the importance of keeping your Mac computers up-to-date, and why PC users need a program like LoJack for security.

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Read more about Kyle on our Management Team page.

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