Locksmith Tools Stolen, Need Help!

LMFAO. This is some great shit. Here we have a locksmith, a genuine secret squirrel with a decoder ring who presumably knows the secret handshake and everything, a gaurdian of the f****ng public trust, and he cant even secure his own damn van! LMFAO some more at this shit. To make matters worse this idiot leaves his laptop with info for "hundreds" of masterkey locations protected probably only by the OS or application login password, which is an easy crack, in the unsecured van. It gets f****ng better: Now you come along and post about the loss here so that on the off chance someone was planning to sell the shit here, now they know whats on the f****ng laptop and that it isnt even encrypted. You guys are geniuses. Has this moron told his customers yet that their master key systems are compromised? Is he going to rekey ALL of the hundreds of locations for FREE? Lets see about locksmith ethics now.

PS coincidentally I am looking to buy some of these same type items so if anybody out there IS looking to sell some of those type items cheap email me.

Well nothing yet. I'll keep checking Ebay and others. Has anyone posted it on Clearstar yet? The man took a big hit. The TCode alone cost him five grand. Any help would be appreciated.

Serial numbers where applicable?

I'll get them ASAP. Flake's hasn't returned the info yet and from what he says he can't find the paperwork. Thanks.

IMHO your best bet if anything resembling the stolen stuff turns up online is to pose as a buyer and try to get serials for what is being sold then compare them to the serials for the stolen items. You will probably run into a deadend if you wind up dealing with the person who actually took them since he probably won't provide the serials but maybe you can at least get a location and if it's local to where the theft occurred that might be enough to get the police to investigate considering the specialized nature and limited availability of most of the tools. If you end up dealing with someone who bought the stuff and is reselling it he or she may not even know it's hot and you might have more luck getting them to provide the numbers. I would also let other locksmiths in the area know since they are the logical market for those type of tools. Most pawn shops probably will not even know what the hell most of it is but I would check them anyway. Also don't ignore the possibility that they were stolen by somebody looking for a financial shortcut to get into the trade. Especially if the van was broken into with a modicum of skill e.g. professionally opened, alarm bypassed entirely or quickly silenced etc. It sounds like the crime was well into felony value and the tools and information stolen certainly have the potential to be used in more crimes so maybe the police will actually seriously investigate and get lucky with prints or something else.

I lost a highend socket set to a car burglary about a year and a half ago. The loser(s) were too stupid to even figure out how to get the Sony CD player out of the dash although they damaged it and the dash but not beyond fairly easy repair. I can tell you that it would have been worth the punk(s) doing it if I could have caught them doing it, although I might have needed a good defense attorney. The cops were actually pretty good and came out and printed the car. They lifted prints but no matches on what they got. Anyway I can sympathize with your friend and best of luck getting the stuff back or replaced.

Don't forget to check Yahoo auctions. I think they allow locksmithing tools.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I dont think the pawn shops would want the stuff like you say. Here in Houston they wont disclose info to someone about what they have. You must go through the police. The police may investigate. The info on the computer although it is password protected can cause big time damage to a few people including a former mayor and a certain cheif of police I wont name if the password is broken.

If you want to check pawn shops pose as a buyer. Call around and say you're a locksmith looking for locksmith tools. If it were pawned it would almost certainly be sold outright not pawned to reclaim so the shops would have it for sale quickly.

The police may investigate.

I don't know how tough the password would be to break. If it's a windows operating system sign on password you could always ask on the windows OS specific groups. I know the new windows NTFS OS's do not yield to the old boot from floppy and type C: and similar ultra simple tricks that the old versions would. If it's for a specific application then ask the vendor. They may or may not tell you the truth and it may be somewhat difficult or quite easy to bypass it. Actually if the masterkeying or database software is passworded you would have two levels of protection unless your friend set up windows with a nopwd required login.

Has anyone posted it

alone cost him five

surely he had adequate insurance ?

That's a real darn shame. I also have a pile of tools in my van, and very very fortunate not have had this happen to me. Tool insurance is incredibly expensive, too.

Glen. I called Monie today and she wasn't aware of it. I did tell my crew that answers the phone to be aware of any tool sales and to let me know if we get an offer. As selective a list as you gave, maybe someone wanted them for their own truck. I've met a few "locksmiths" here in Houston I wouldn't trust knowing what I have in my van, for fear of them taking them.

Mr.bill

Thanks to everyone for their help.

He has insurance. He said he was waiting to hear from them today. Most likely the deductable is going to be high though.

Thanks mr.bill for helping spread the word.

It happened about 3:30 in the morning. He said his neighbor noticed that someone tried to break into his' truck too around that time and he looked out to see a small black or blue car drive away. The lady down the street also had her car broken into and saw the same car. I think it was a random thing. The people most likely dont know what they have.

Done.

them today. Most

neighbor noticed that

time and he looked

down the street

think it was a random

then the pawn shops are looking better & better..

If it's just a logon password the thief can use a live CD Linux distribution such as Morphix to mount the NTFS partition(s) and it's game over. It gets harder (but not impossible) if a BIOS pasword is set. If you have valuable data it should be encrypted on the disk. IBM Thinkpads have data encryption built in to the hard disk controller. The encryption software built into new versions of windows is not particularly secure in its default mode, security is compromised by the need for a password recovery feature and it leaves unencrypted file fragments all over the place. Anyone who can break the administrator password (Google is your friend) can read your data. Better to use one of the many free encryption utilities available on the net.