My friend's studio got robbed

Andrius Simutis said:
If you hid the tiles well they'd have no idea they're there. You could put one inside the bag under the padding, or cut a tiny part of the stitching to slip one in. Bigger cameras usually have a few voids in them where you could put something like a Tile or other tracker. You could take apart the handle and stick one in the hollow part of that. Anyone stealing something with a Tile wouldn't know it's there by using the app, although they would then alert the system as to where it is.
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I think you misunderstood my point. The Tile sends a signal. There are simple devices you can sweep over the stolen item and they'll alert you to a signal and precise location. Any thief worth his salt (a pro) would have no problem with it, because they've got their tools - faraday cage bags and signal sweepers. You are right about opportunistic thieves basically just grabbing stuff with no pre-planning and no tools - random thiefs not pro-thiefs. The thing about that is that the range of a tile is about 100 feet. Unless you have folks around who have the app within that range who can extend your hub, you are counting on a lot of luck (unless the app become so popular almost everyone has it). And then the battery in the tile collapses after about 1 year. If your gear gets stolen right after you put a tile in it, you got one year, if it gets stolen 11 months into it, you got one month and anything in-between. I'm not saying it's useless, but the tile was designed for a different use scenario - for tracking stuff you misplaced, not theft prevention/retrieval. Anyhow, it will surely help, but we should not think it's a much of a solution - at the margins at most.
 
I worked at a church and they'd just bought a new Mac Mini. I installed LogMeIn (remote desktop software) on it so I could put finished media on the Mac Mini for presentation from where ever I was and load it into the presentation software.

Anyway, after a few weeks it went missing. Church didn't have security cameras so we had no idea who took it. I looked on the LogMeIn control panel, but the computer showed up as offline for a month or so.

Then, out of nowhere, the computer showed up on my LogMeIn control panel. I waited until the middle of the night to log in (LogMeIn gives the computer being remoted into a pop up window alerting them that their computer is being monitored/controlled... so I waited until I thought they were asleep) and sure enough... the computer was not wiped... still had the same user name and password.

The guy who stole it was playing Firefly on Netflix fullscreen... I assumed he was asleep and had just left it running. I went to the Netflix.com account page, found his name and address, then restored playback on Netflix and logged out. Gave the address/name to the executive pastor at church, he forwarded it to the police, they went to the thief's house... and sure enough, got the Mac Mini back :)
 
OldCorpse said:
I think you misunderstood my point. The Tile sends a signal. There are simple devices you can sweep over the stolen item and they'll alert you to a signal and precise location. Any thief worth his salt (a pro) would have no problem with it, because they've got their tools - faraday cage bags and signal sweepers.
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You watch too many movies. Those thieves simply do not exist in the real world. The most sophisticated thieves cut the power and phone line, and even those are exceptionally rare. A thief stealing tech gear is not a tech head but someone who's fallen through life's cracks to wind up stealing stuff to get ahead. Opportunistic almost by definition.


OldCorpse said:
The thing about that is that the range of a tile is about 100 feet. Unless you have folks around who have the app within that range who can extend your hub, you are counting on a lot of luck (unless the app become so popular almost everyone has it).
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You're absolutely right about that and that's why I was bringing this up earlier as a question really...how good are these things? If adoption rates are good the chance of anything crossing paths with an enabled Tile App are high. If only a handful of people have it then you're way more dependent on luck. In a dense city where the stolen goods are moving from victim to thief to fence to being sold there's a good chance it's going to ping somewhere. If it's a camera in use, it'll be out and about all over the place and have even more opportunity to register. If it's a TV that the thief steals for their own use inside their home out in the countryside, then yeah...you're probably never going to ping it.
One other thing that could be increase the usefulness is if the police start using this system too. The cops are out and about in enough numbers that they would come across it and be in a position to do something about it. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but back in the 80's-90's LoJack was popular because they worked to get their stolen car trackers in police cars so there is some precedence here.
Either way, it's an interesting technology and I'd be curious to see more real world results with it.
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
Whoa! How do you average 1/year???
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I work a LOT with my own gear. I also do a lot of small-crew work out of vehicles smaller than a production van.

I also run a rental house, but hopefully I never need to make a claim for that business. When things are on rent, it's covered by the renter's policy, not mine.
 
Andrius Simutis said:
A thief stealing tech gear is not a tech head but someone who's fallen through life's cracks to wind up stealing stuff to get ahead. Opportunistic almost by definition.
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Maybe in the US, not in the UK, many thieves are on average salaries with homes cars etc, some even have jacked in their jobs as crime pays much better.
One guy on a project I was told about was eyeing up some expensive alloy wheels on a car and planning how he could come back later in a van and steal them, no conscience to him it was fair game, something to be taken (scum).
Its opportunistic ok but its dog eat dog.
 
ProfessorU said:
I work a LOT with my own gear. I also do a lot of small-crew work out of vehicles smaller than a production van.

I also run a rental house, but hopefully I never need to make a claim for that business. When things are on rent, it's covered by the renter's policy, not mine.
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Did you ever have to claim anything using renter's insurance policy? I'm curios how it works (and if it does in the first place)?
 
The rental shop has been open for a little over 18 months. Lots of our renters are smaller and don't have insurance (usually rentals under $2500), so we've had a few drops and spills and one theft that our customers have to pay for. We had one renter insured whose house was robbed while our equipment was inside. His insurance paid for most of his losses, less a deductible. The theif stole the teleprompter laptop but left the teleprompter and most other equipment behind, fortunately.

My insurance claims for my own work have always been a hassle. Insurance companies love to find the loopholes. Having a good agent who understands your business can help prevent you from getting caught with the wrong coverage, and possibly go to bat for you if you have a loss.
 
Sickens me to see this happen. I had a couple cameras pinched out of my car a few years ago. Irony...it was parked outside my attorney's office. I stopped by there (had been hit by a drunk driver a few weeks before) on my way to a gig (which broke one of my cams). Get to the shoot, no cameras. Bad day all around. I hope you are able to recover some or all of the gear.

Note...drunk driver went to jail.
 
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