Stolen laptop recovered abroad via Twitter

Senior Abi Olvera had just set her MacBook Air down to use a pay phone at a train station in Seville, Spain, when minutes later a man stole it.

With the help of local police, Twitter, Preyproject.com, friend Mariam Saoma and the Help Desk, she was able to get her laptop back and recover half of her deleted files.

"I saw someone come over and use the phone, but I didn't see him take it," Olvera said. "He made it really inconspicuous. When I found out it was missing, I immediately called the train manager and then called my brother."

The train station manager said that they would check and see whether the laptop had been turned into the lost and found, Olvera said. She was visiting her brother who is stationed near Seville as a Marine, she said, and was on her way to Madrid on Nov. 26 when the laptop was stolen. Olvera was on break from studying abroad at the School of International Training in Switzerland. When she arrived in Madrid, Olvera filed a police report, she said.

"They told me they were checking things out, and I was freaking out," she said. "I called one of my friends to look at the local craigslist. Then I remembered I'd installed the program."

Before going abroad, Olvera said she had downloaded a free theft-protection program from Preyproject.com, which becomes hidden on the computer once installed.

When you have lost your laptop you go on the website and report that your laptop is missing. Every 20 minutes it will take and send you a screenshot of the desktop, the Internet Protocol addresses, and an approximate street address from your computer's location, Olvera said.

"I couldn't do much with the address and the police said they couldn't do anything with the picture, but that they'd send it to the other police," she said. "I'm really glad I speak Spanish fluently. That was really lucky. There are different levels of police, and they kept redirecting me to each other."

Olvera realized she was not going to get an answer soon, so she went on Twitter and tweeted the photo to Twitter users in the pueblo, who retweeted her tweet, Olvera said.

"One tweeter said that they recognized the guy as a local teacher," she said. "So that tweeter got me his full name, and schedule. I was disgusted. He's a high school professor. I'm a student too, and he could see my files so he knew that I was a student. I would think that he would have empathy for that."

She went on the teacher's Facebook profile and printed out a photo, then gave the police all the information she had gathered. The police went to confront him the same night, Olvera said.

"The cops let him off because he gave back the laptop easily," she said. "I accessed it remotely and verified that he deleted everything and that he had reformatted everything to Spanish."

The police in Seville took the laptop to the U.S. Embassy. It was going to be too expensive to ship, so Olvera called her friend, junior Mariam Saoma, who was studying in Seville, to see if she could bring it back for her, she said.

"At first I wasn't sure if I wanted to help because what if something happened to it?" Saoma said.

When Olvera explained it was a MacBook Air and Saoma could easily carry it on, Saoma said she had agreed to help. Saoma went to the Embassy where the laptop was wrapped in a big well-packed box, she said.

"I asked if she wanted me to ship it to her, but she said to hang onto it over the break instead," Saoma said.

When the friends reunited last week, Olvera said she had called the Help Desk to see if it had file-recovery software. It did.

"I'm just really glad we have such a strong support system," Olvera said. "They can do anything!"

Olvera said that her professors had been very understanding and that she had been given a two-month extension on the research project on global health and development she had been conducting at her abroad institution.

Saoma said she could not believe the recovery story when she had heard it from Olvera.

"I've told all my friends about it," Saoma said. "I was just like, 'Wow.' If I'd lost my computer, I'd never see it again, especially in Spain. It's not like here where you can leave your laptop, gum or whatever in the library while you go to D-hall and come back, and it's all there."

Olvera was glad she had a friend in Spain, she said.

"I'm going to make her a cake or something," Olvera said. "I just don't know what yet."

Olvera said the ordeal had showed the power of social networking.

"It was so nice to think I only tweeted it to eight people," she said. "I'm not a big tweeter, so I didn't think they'd retweet me or would subscribe to me. Some people tweeted back, 'I hope you find it.'"

Contact staff writer Elizabeth Ygartua at elizabeth.ygartua@richmond.edu.