I posted back in march about a new service called GadgetTrak which offered to increase the chances of recovering a stolen gadget. It seemed like a nifty idea for $12/year, and not wanting to disappointed, I signed up. I downloaded the agent files, tweaked them a bit to make them more believable to a thief, and then loaded them on my iPod. I had 5 licenses, so I sold a couple to my friends and loaded it onto their ipods.

Sure enough, I get a phone call one day from a friend who has GadgetTrak saying that his ipod was stolen, and he wondered if I could turn on “that tracker thing”. I activated tracking, but we didn’t receive any info for almost three weeks. When we had almost lost hope, I got a little email in my inbox stating that the ipod had been plugged into a couple at [ip address] onto a computer called ****** family.

We contacted GadgetTrak and they sent us all the information we needed to recover the ipod. Luckily it was not necessary to go to the police and their ISP to find out who it was. My friend recognized the **** family (name changed to protect the guilty) as a fellow student who goes to his high school.

So I gathered and sent him all the logs, notification emails, and other information I had proving the ipod was his. Luckily we had entered his serial number into GadgetTrak (probably wouldn’t have recorded it otherwise) and we were able to use that to prove the ipod’s rightful owner.

Looking back, I think the kid probably heard my friend boasting about his tracking software, so he only used wall chargers. After a month though, he probably thought it was safe, and let it slip. So if you have a gadget that needs protecting, I highly recommend you buy GadgetTrak. The price has gone up from $12 to $20, but it is still an amazing deal (Especially if you lose things often). You get five licenses and stickers, which should be enough to cover your camera, phone, music player, USB drive, and whatever else you have.

If you buy a license, be sure to check out my post on how to tweak the agent files to make it more believable to a thief (right text to put, real ipod icon, etc).