As Ireland goes high tech, laptop computer thefts rise

By Andrew Bushe

DUBLIN — Part of the livery of the Celtic Tiger technocrat, the expensive and portable laptop computer, is proving irresistible to thieves.

Laptops are trendy and coveted not just by the country’s flourishing high-tech and financial whiz-kids but also by thieves, who find them easy to steal and lucrative to fence.

Owners are delighted that they are becoming small, lighter and more portable, but this is also making them more attractive to criminals.

A spokesperson for the Irish Insurance Federation said it is becoming increasingly difficult to get "all-risks" cover for laptops.

This means that when people take them out of their homes and use them as a mobile computer — the whole point of laptops — they are not covered.

"They are very vulnerable items and attractive to thieves because they are so expensive," the spokesperson said. "Many companies reckon they are just too much of a risk."

A Garda spokesman said they had no evidence of any criminal ring involved in the laptop larceny. "The thefts appear to be unrelated and to be largely impulse stealing," the police spokesman said.

Separate statistics for laptop thefts are not kept by the police, but they believe the figures are increasing as they become more widely used.

The Dell computer company warned that people will have to realize how easily the computers can be taken and not leave them on passenger seats in cars or put them down unguarded in pubs, hotels, stations or airports.

The company said it has alerted gardai in a number of cases where people had called looking for technical support for a laptop that had been stolen.

"Out technicians are trained to deal with the calls as normal and then alert the gardai," said Simon Kelehan, Dell Notebook product marketing manager.

As an anti-theft device, Dell builds in password protection at three levels in its laptop systems that make complex changes in the settings technically difficult to make.

"When we get an call from a customer saying his notebook has been stolen, we log in with the service tag when and where it was stolen, the police officer in charge of the investigation and, in the case of Britain, the crime incident report number," Kelehan said.

"We are noticing an increase in thefts in the UK and Ireland. They are a valuable asset and as the usage and the penetration of the market grows, it is inevitable that theft will grow also. The system we use has been fairly successful in recovering machines.

"I know that in some of the big international consultancy companies operating here staff are trained from day one to be hypersensitive about the security of their laptops. They are told to never leave it down and always lock it in the boot of a car rather than leave it on open display.

"I suppose that discipline comes from international experience where theft might be much more widespread. They have obviously suffered the pain of thefts in other markets abroad."

There were an estimated 265,000 laptops stolen in the U.S. in 1996 and 309,000 in 1997 and special computer investigation units have been set up by the FBI and state police forces.

Often, the cost of the laptop pales into insignificance compared to the value of the data that is lost.

"As they are being used more and more as the primary machine to replace a desktop PC, much more critical information is going on them, like financial projections and sensitive customer and company details," Kelehan said.

The new crime is creating new technology to counter it. Owners can now buy a number of devices or software to try to combat the thieves or recover the laptops if they are taken.

There are special locks and cables to fasten them to desks, an alarm system that sounds when a laptop is separated from a radio transmitter you carry and a software program that enables a stolen machine to dial up a monitoring service.