So well, this is one of the good news, and stories for once!
On my way home from a party on saturday the 18th of may just above 3 AM, i was robbed by a guy. He had been with me on the train ride home, and waited until i was alone and left the train station, where upon he drove up to me, jumped of the bike and started beating on me. I'm not one to panic, so i fought back, but taken by surprise i lost the fight, and ended up pretty banged up. The guy took my Asus Nexus 7 tablet, my iPod Touch (which had a broken screen and was pretty much worthless) and my wallet. He missed my phone for some reason (probably thought my iPod was an iPhone), but since it was a crappy HTC which was held together by duct tape, so it hardly didn't matter whether or not he stole it.
This picture was taken 32 hours after the robbery (not recommended for people who doesn't like seeing people who have taken 12+ fists to the face).
So anyway, my Nexus 7 tablet was rooted, running CyanogenMod 10.1 and had Avast! Anti-Theft installed rooted. So it was time to put it to the test.
I checked close to every day on the Avast management site to see if the tablet had woken up. Finally, one day i checked, the tablet had been online the night before. I didn't get the chance to activate the tracking, but i did manage to get an IP-address, which i reported to police. Unfortunately the IP-address could only get me to the city which it was located (which was about 28 miles/46 kilometers away from where i lived). I knew that my tablet had been factory-wiped given that it was encrypted, but since Avast! was still running on it, i started checking several times during the day. Finally, i caught it online around midnight, just 1½ week after the robbery, and activated the tracking feature through the Avast! interface on 1 minute intervals. After i was sure i had a precise address, i changed the tracking to once every hour and went to sleep.
The police called me the next day, saying they would send someone to the address i provided between 10 and 12 AM that day. The tablet was still reporting it's location every hour, but it stopped reporting in after 9:48 AM that morning. This likely meant that either the police had been there and grabbed it, or that they had been there and not grabbed it and the thief had turned it off.
It took a week before i got the phone call (likely because it was grabbed by a different police precinct), but last monday, 3th june, the guy responsible for handling the case called me. He had my tablet, but being unable to turn it on due to a lack of a charger, they wanted me to come in to confirm that it was mine. So today i went there, and since i had already given them the EMEI/Serial Number - which i hadn't written down, but was also provided by the Avast! interface - i could boot up the tablet and confirm that the number was correct and that did indeed belong to me (not that the wear and tear, CyanogenMod and other software modifications i had done didn't give it away too). So today i present this picture, taken at the police station. Thanks Avast!
On a sidenote, the robber is still not caught, but based on pictures and surveillance from the Train and witness statements from me, the police are aware of his identity. So it's likely only a matter of time before they can send his ass to jail (right after i sue it first for pain caused and loss of money because the insurance didn't cover all of my losses).
