A Modesto computer service technician turned into a detective last weekend when he tracked a suspected burglar and watched activity on a stolen laptop unfold until police arrived.
The victim left her east Modesto home Sunday morning to go shopping. She returned to find it had been burglarized.
She immediately called police. Her second call was to her go-to computer expert, Shane McLafferty, who had installed anti-theft software on her computer about a year ago. She told him her computer, as well as several iPods and watches, had been stolen.
McLafferty had installed the software called Prey on about 10 of his customers' computers but had never used it.
"I dug around on my computer and activated the program," he said, excited about the chance to take it for a test drive.
He reported the computer missing on the software's control panel, then waited, hoping that the thief had powered up the laptop so it could communicate with the Prey server.
Within five minutes, McLafferty received his first report from the computer, which informed him whoever had it had been using it for about two hours.
First McLafferty erased all of the victim's bank account information, cookies, browsing history and passwords. The software gave McLafferty the option to wipe all the information off the computer's hard drive, but he didn't want to alert the suspected thief that he was on to him.
"I wanted this program to run as stealthily as possible," he said.
Prey gave McLafferty the user's Internet Protocol address from Comcast and activated the computer's Web cam, which sent McLafferty a few dark images of a man's arm and one of a doorknob. The pictures were intriguing but didn't depict details that could help locate the computer.
But the software sent screen shots of what the thief was looking at on the computer. McLafferty's curiosity was piqued when the suspect logged on to Facebook and started chatting — with poor spelling and grammar — about the stolen property.
The suspect wrote to a friend, "wjhats up? where u at? i hgot some wtches, i pods, fir sale."
He told the friend he was on the east side of Modesto, off Riverside Drive.
It is the same area in which the victim lives, but it still wasn't enough to locate the suspect.
McLafferty then got the Prey report that would be the key to retrieving the stolen laptop. The software used WiFi triangulation to pinpoint the location of the Internet router the computer was using.
WiFi triangulation searches for networks in a certain range, then measures signal strength and compares the results with a global database, according to Ars Technica, an online technology newspaper.
The software sent McLafferty a Google Maps image of the suspect's address, about a half-mile from the victim's home. McLafferty called his friend, who said police had just arrived at her house.
McLafferty said he told the victim that the WiFi triangulation had found her computer. Then, he waited for her return call.
In the meantime, he continued to monitor the suspect's online activity. He logged into the victim's iTunes account and purchased music, as well as changed the wallpaper, toolbar and log in password.
About an hour after McLafferty began tracking the stolen computer, police were at the suspect's home in the 2600 block of El Charro Drive.
Modesto police Lt. Rick Armendariz said officers saw a man leaving with the stolen property.
Deamus Woodward, 29, was arrested on suspicion of burglary and parole violation.
McLafferty got a thrill from chasing down the suspect and credits the anti-theft software for solving the case within three hours.
As for the victim, who asked not to be identified, she said: "If it wasn't for (McLafferty), they never would have found this guy. I can't believe this actually happened and I can't believe I got everything back."
"The police were amazed, too," she said. "(The officer) said this never happens."
Bee staff writer Erin Tracy can be reached at etracy@modbee.com or (209) 578-2366.
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