Automatically Backed-Up Hard Drive Catches Computer Thief

From Officer Casimiro Pierantoni’s Berkeley Area 1 crime update:

Someone left  left a laptop bag on the back seat of a car parked near Hearst Avenue and Euclid Avenue.  A thief smashed the car window and stole the laptop.   The victim had a back-up program installed on his computer that automatically uploaded new data from the computer’s hard drive to an online virtual storage location. The thief, not knowing of the back-up program, proceeded to take photographs of himself with the computer’s built-in camera; those photographs were eventually up-loaded to the internet based storage location.  The victim discovered the photographs of the suspect and passed them along to the police, who recognized the suspect as Gerardo Vegas,  with a long history of auto burglary and theft who had just been released from jail at the start of the year.

The Detectives closely examined the photographs and noticed that Vega appeared to be sitting in a motel room when he snapped the pictures with the computer’s camera.  Theorizing that the victim’s computer had accessed the internet thorough the motel’s wireless internet system, they began work to identify the I.P. address utilized by the victim’s computer.  They also checked Berkeley and  Oakland motels.  At one of the motels, they spotted Vega getting into a car in a motel parking lot. The Detectives stopped Vega and arrested him for possession of the stolen laptop.  They located additional stolen property (from other auto burglaries) inside Vega’s car and in his motel room.