johncharles17

[johncharles17]

More amateur detective work and some pretty fucking incriminating evidence…

A few weeks ago I was in the Apple Store and when they asked if it was okay to email the receipt, I thought “Hang on, so there’s a record of all my purchases that’s tied to my card?”, so obviously I asked them to print me out a couple of duplicate receipts from back in 2011. Imagine my complete lack of surprise when they showed two iPad 2s had been bought on my card, identical to the iPads I have heaps of screenshots of Plumpy selling on eBay.

But hey, iPads are pretty common, right? I was hoping my request to the Met under the Data Protection Act would tell me exactly what was bought on my card in the £7,147.25 fraud, but the cops redacted so much of it that all that was left was the things I’d told them, which obviously I already know, ‘cos I said them. At a guess, like CCTV that would have tied Plumps to each transaction and to the robbery, I’d say it was never investigated.

So, kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner whilst also agreeing with myself that this is actually the sort of thing you’d expect the cops to do, I decided to go off on a little mission. The stuff was all bought on my card, my bank’s fraud department weren’t responding to emails, I could hit each store with a Subject Access Request (just like I did the Met) but they cost a tenner and frankly it’d be a fucking ballache. So I started contacting each company in turn saying I’d spotted a transaction on my statement I couldn’t remember making and asking if they could confirm what it was for. A few put up some resistance or asked for ID but pretty soon I had an inbox full of receipts, and that’s exactly what came in the post from Louis Vuitton the other day the posh bastards.

And guess what? One of two pairs of shoes bought on my card for £435 exactly matches a pair I saw Plumpy selling on eBay in late 2011, as you can see below. I’ve posted a couple of times about these shoes because they’re just so lovely, once a while ago and then more recently with a painstaking grammatical deconstruction of Plumpy’s very particular sales parlance.

Extract from the above ad:

BRAND NEW IN DE BOX LOUIS VUITTON SHOES 101% ORIGINAL GINUWIN DIRECT FROM KNIGHTSBRIDGE STORE MY GIRL GOT IT FOR ME AS CHRISTMAST PRESENT BUT UNFORTUNETLY DECIDE TO SELL IT AGAIN AS AM NOT LV LOVER LOOL

Actually it was the New Bond Street store, it says so on the receipt.

So I now have a whole heap of screenshots from my stolen laptop’s tracking software that so far seem to match up with this other pile of receipts for stuff that was fraudulently bought on my card. I also have loads of webcam shots of a certain baldy-headed Gooner painstakingly constructing the aforementioned eBay ads and I even have screenshots of the linked account’s Hotmail inbox showing mails about shoes, iPads and all sorts of other stuff. Should be pretty interesting when I’ve got all the receipts back…

This could all be a massive coincidence though, so in true Plumpergeddon style I’m just gonna put it all on the blog and leave you lot to make up your own minds who might be responsible for spending £7147.25 on my card. Who knows, maybe even the cops will speak to eBay and we’ll end up with a complete history for Plumpy’s three accounts that shows him hard at work selling nearly everything that was bought on my card on 29th October 2011.

Check Out Our Homepage.

[johncharles17]

Tracked!

WEEK 4

So now my laptop was happily phoning home but I worked out I’d made the crucial mistake of not logging into the Guest account (the only non-password protected one, a sort-of digital carrot on a stick) and allowing connections via Little Snitch, which is a firewall for outgoing connections.

But luckily, as you saw in the last post, our hapless criminal eventually took care of that step for me and even managed to permanently allow it.

Now I even had a screenshot of my login screen with my company name on it, so I could prove to even the most technophobic of Police that this person, even if they did not actually rob me, was currently in possession of my laptop. Net closing in? You’d think so.

Here’s Hidden giving me lots of useful information:

Quite a few tasty (and risqué!) looking screenshots there but what are all those fuzzy blobs? Well, Hidden simultaneously takes a screenshot, records any network information like your IP address and the Wifi network you’re currently on, geolocates the laptop to within 50 metres or so and takes a shot on the webcam. But all the webcam shots were just a fuzzy blob, so no mugshot for me. Sadface…

OS X/Hidden can’t disable the green light on the Mac’s iSight camera (for obvious pervy reasons), this had obviously been troubling our criminal mastermind, who now had my laptop, so he took the precautionary measure of sticking some tape over the camera. I wouldn’t be able to see anything then, would I? Of course not, Sellotape constitutes all the online security a person needs!

The webcam, being less than useful:

So now the tracking software was happily reporting back and I knew my laptop was on a specific street in Acton, West London, namely East Acton Lane. I also had some other tidbits (watch this space…) via the screenshots, but no mugshot and no actual address.

Also I couldn’t prove that the person who currently had it was either the same one who robbed me, or the person responsible for the fraudulent card use (I’ll get to that bit too…), but I might at least get it back soon. I even had his IP address, so his ISP could easily be traced. Surely the Police could get some leads from all this?! Surely!!

Over to you then, boys…

As well as check out our Homepage.

[johncharles17]

Background

On the night of 28.10.11, I had my MacBook Pro, debit card and PIN robbed from me in Central London. I‘d installed tracking software on the laptop and eventually it kicked in, not just with a few images but a whole slew of information potentially linking the current ‘owner’ to the original crime and subsequent £7,000 card fraud. Soon I was sitting on nearly 6,000 photos, details of numerous eBay accounts listing items that very closely matched those bought on my card, along with a bunch of other suspicious online activity. I wanted my MacBook back, so after being closely sorted and scrutinised, all of this evidence was passed directly to the Metropolitan Police.

As this inexplicably went on and on and on with still no arrest, I managed to get a new laptop from my insurance company and concentrated on fixing my business instead of hassling the Police daily for updates on a crime they didn’t seem at all bothered about.

So this is the story of what the Police didn’t do with all that evidence and what I’m doing with it now.

I’m doing this because I’m not willing to just forget about it, it’s partly for my own sanity and for some closure but mainly it’s because this is all far too entertaining to just sit on. I’m doing it in the hope that the person responsible is publicly shamed for the extent of his crimes and so others might be forewarned. Most of all though, I’m doing something because the Police didn’t.

Check out our Homepage.

[johncharles17]

Inaccuracies in The Register article

Just a quick post about an article The Register published this morning.

After promising an opportunity to review the article prior to its publication, this failed to happen and my request for anonymity was ignored when the article mentioned me by name. Having had previous dealings with the press, I pre-empted this happening and gave a false name, which has now been part-removed.

The article makes it sound as if money is my primary motivation. This is based on a line from a private email used out of context, so to clarify - it’s not.

My motivations are:

Public shaming/revenge on Plumpy by publicising both his crimes and his ‘actions’ with my laptop, the latter usually involving a wrist, maybe making wannabe future thieves think twice.

Expose the Police failings in my case and maybe by doing so prevent this happening to someone else in the future (probably being a bit delusional here, b'hey…)

Gain some closure for myself whilst providing some entertainment for you lot, it has been very therapeutic and I can now actually listen to my bank’s on-hold music without the usual involuntary shudder.

This whole incident did cost me a lot of money, both directly and in loss-of-earnings, so whilst I have no qualms about putting ads on the site, the sum total of ad revenue currently stands at under £100 - far less than I’d earn in a normal day’s work. Clearly I’ve spent longer than that working on this blog, so it’s hardly a lucrative use of my time.

Well I’m glad we got that cleared up, now back to the show!

And check out our Homepage