2oceansViber, Fred, got in contact with us recently about his stolen MacBook Pro, which was grabbed by a thief as Fred confronted him in his bedroom. The thief and the MacBook got away, but Dropbox remained installed. Imagine the surprise when pictures from his stolen Mac started appearing in his Dropbox. They tell quite a story.

When Dropbox launched a new feature to automatically back up photos when you plug in a camera, interesting shit started to go down. Pictures, presumably taken by the thief, started showing up on Fred’s computer at work.

From Fred himself:

Clearly whoever bought the computer (or is in posession of it now) just thought that this backup is on the computer itself and not online… and accepted the prompt. Which resulted in me starting to receive notifications of files being added to my dropbox since Thursday last week…

At first I just thought it was some mistake, and then checked in the settings that the latest activity on the account was from my old MacBook, still named the same name.

Here’s what we can gather from the pics:

• The thief is most likely a Rastafarian
• He (or she) smokes, or is at least in the company of people that smoke INSANE amounts of weed
• They may or may not drive a Golf Mk II
• They may or may not have a music studio
• They enjoy going to festivals and may possibly play in a band
• May or may not think that “Big girl, you are beautiful”

Tracing the IP address from Dropbox’s web interface shows that the Mac is still somewhere in Cape Town. Although it has been replaced, we’d like to see where this story goes.

The response on Facebook was overwhelming and people that I don’t even know are offering to help find out where it is – someone knows the studio wall padding manufacturer, and someone else knows the speaker distributors, and we have a car registration number  to work with… so who knows?

Can you help track down Fred’s Mac?