Laptops Arena

In this article we are going to treat a somewhat delicate subject, that of stolen laptops. Many people tend to panic when they have some important stolen and the truth is one laptop can hold some valuable information about a person or a company. If the laptop is stolen from an office of a company, the risk of producing harm is way bigger because companies have important files that include top secret information which is priceless to the competitors. Stolen laptops can be subject to blackmail. We have read that almost 97% of stolen laptops are never recovered.

There is a special FBI force that deals with this matter and it is called the FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey division. When your laptop is stolen, you are exposed to identity theft.  As it is always better to avoid than to combat, make sure you don’t leave your laptop in public places or on the back seat of the car where it is visible to all those that pass by. In 2003, more than 600.000 laptops where stolen and this is worrying because they appear to be as easy to steal as a cell phone. One very good way to prevent any possible problem is to buy a lock for the laptop. If you read some of our laptop reviews you have seen that laptops have a Kensington lock slot which is not that useless as you may think. This does not mean that if you lock your laptop you can just leave it anywhere. They are a security measure similar to bicycle locks and if a thief is really determined, they will bypass these lock with ease.

One of the most common places where people leave laptops that are stolen is on the car seat. Other such places are the public wireless hot spots. In a coffee shop in San Francisco, some poor finance manager got stabbed in the chest by a robber who desperately wanted his Apple PowerBook. There are ways in which you can avoid becoming a victim. If you are a person that carries their laptop around a lot make sure your laptop is password protected. This should make it difficult for the robber to access your files unless he is a professional hacker. If you use your laptop as a desktop replacement and keep it at home all the time then such measure are not needed. Of course, you have to keep in mind the robber also break into people’s homes so you could still be a victim and have your laptop stolen. PGP Whole Disk Encryption is a program which you can purchase for $150 and it is a piece of software that can scramble your hard disk.



In the past, the main reason why thieves stole laptops was to resell them on the black market of to take out the part and sell them separately. Now, the main target is the information which is stored on the laptop. You can always choose to encrypt some files and folders which should be of major privacy. There are lots of free programs which are available on the internet and can help you do just that but keep in mind that all the information stored in the browser cache is not that easy to encrypt using those products. It’s a bit of a relief to know that most thieves steal laptops for the hardware but nevertheless, if you think you could be the victim of an identity theft, you should inform the local authorities immediately. Finding a stolen laptop is not difficult if you have proper tracing software installed. What these programs do is to connect periodically to the internet and if a PC is reported stolen, that particular laptop will return details on its location. This information is reported to the competent authorities. The success rate is somewhere at 90%.



There are Absolute tracking packages which are available to business users. These packages have extremely useful option like erasing certain data of the laptop has been reported stolen. Another solution could be to scramble the data yourself. If you want to store secret information on your laptop like back account number and certain ID information, you could come up with a code that only makes sense to you and that way if your laptop is stolen, the information will be useless to anyone else.



We advise you to treat this problem seriously because the number of identity theft cases is constantly growing. You don’t even have to get your laptop stolen to be exposed to identity theft. Hackers try to exploit online money transmission systems, sweepstake contests and even internet auctions. Phishing is also a common way to steal personal information. Hackers make exact replicas of famous bank websites and then they e-mail you telling you to go to the website and re-enter your personal information because they are updating their client database. The fake website link is written somewhere in that e-mail. You should know that bank will never ask you to do something like that. If they need to update the database, they will contact you by phone and ask you to go to the nearest bank and fill in a form. Do not click any links of fake banks in the e-mail and always go to the official website of the bank.



A research was conducted back in 2007 and it pointed out that the American citizens who are greatly exposed to identity theft are those living in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit. The complaints that were registered are different, from bank frauds, credit card frauds but also home utility frauds. Try not to store on your laptop information like your bank account number, social security number or credit card PIN codes. Also try to make constant backups of the files on your laptop because if it gets stolen there is a good change you may never see them again. Also, try not to carry a laptop with you in public places like parks or coffee shops unless it is really necessary.