Net sleuths expose dealer in stolen goods

How message board members found a stolen laptop from an online market and set up a sting operation

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By Lasse Kerkelä
     
      It was a nasty shock when he saw it.
      Kari Päivärinta, an Espoo importer of equipment for music studios and recording studios, spotted on his return from having a cup of coffee that someone had smashed in the window of his car, parked in the centre of Oulu.
      The Apple PowerBook computer that had been on floor between the front and back seat was no longer there.
      Päivärinta marched to the police station and reported the theft.
      The result was fairly predictable: "I was told that finding the laptop again was pretty unlikely. The police officer basically just shrugged", recalls Päivärinta of the meeting three weeks ago.
      After the police comments, he was more or less resigned to the fact that the laptop was a goner and he would never see it or its equally valuable contents again.
     
He was wrong. Things didn't turn out quite that way. One of Päivärinta's friends started a thread about the theft on a message board - one mainly devoted to computer-related matters and to "things Apple" in particular. The board's name is Hopeinen omena: "Silver Apple", after the Apple logo.
      One week after the theft, on March 27th, a board member using the login handle bbin reported on the same thread that a notebook computer answering the description, a PowerBook G4 1.25GHz, with a 15" screen and a 75Gb hard drive, was up for sale on the Huuto.net online auction site - a kind of Finnish eBay.
     
The seller wrote that he had acquired the "nearly-new" laptop as a legacy. All of the details of the machine fitted with the one liberated from Päivärinta's car, including all the comments made by the seller to enquiries from potential buyers.
      Päivärinta called the police about the suspicious online sale.
      "I got a reply from the police that could I get back to them a bit later. It was frustrating, because I needed the machine and its contents back, and there it was, kind of on a plate."
      At this point the message board members took the criminal investigation into their own hands.
     
With the auction already done and dusted, seven days after the first announcement, the highest bidder received notes from two or three people suggesting that the item might well be stolen property.
      The matter was confirmed when the seller sent the highest bidder the serial number of the PowerBook on offer, and it matched exactly with that of the stolen machine.
      Martti Tiainen from Tuusula, another subscriber on the Hopeinen omena forum, sent the seller a message on Huuto.net, offering EUR 200 more than the highest bid that had been received. The original highest bidder, who was acting in perfectly good faith, did not wish to get involved in the matter, so a new "buyer" had to be found.
      The EUR 200 was tempting enough. The seller took the bait.
      Tiainen and Päivärinta met for the first time IRL (in real life, as the saying goes) when they both arrived at the main railway station in Helsinki immediately before the planned encounter with the seller.
     
"I had already called the police to get their input on how we should act in this situation. The police in Helsinki said to call them when we had the guy", recalls Päivärinta.
      They had "back-up" in the form of four railway station security guards whom they told about the stolen computer.
      Tiainen went alone to meet the seller in a restaurant. The others waited downstairs.
      The seller, who appeared quite relaxed, agreed to open up the machine, at which point Tiainen saw the serial number, and was able to confirm that the Apple belonged to Päivärinta.
     
He then gave a signal to Päivärinta and the four security men, who appeared as if from nowhere and surrounded the seller. Päivärinta introduced himself as the real owner of the stolen computer.
      "Oh Yeah? Sure, sure", offered the seller, possibly wondering how a transaction that was going down 600 kilometres from Oulu had taken such a strange turn.
      After a while, the police arrived, and took both the seller and the computer to the Helsinki Police Department HQ in Pasila. Päivärinta got his PowerBook back two days later.
     
Päivärinta acknowledges that a great deal of police time and energy goes into crimes that are more serious than the property theft of a laptop computer. By the same token, he did feel nevertheless that the police were rather indifferent about pursuing the case.
      "It occasionally felt as though the only way to get anything done was to do it yourself in Wild West fashion", he commented.
      By any standards, he was fortunate to get his property back: a private sale, rather than an offering on an online auction portal, would be far less likely to attract the attention of Internet sleuths*. Arguably, he was also fortunate in that an Apple PowerBook stands out somewhat from the grey mass of much more common Windows-driven PCs or laptops.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 18.4.2006
     
*Note: An earlier, much graver incident showed the power of message board communities and Internet chatrooms, in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shopping mall bombing that took place in Vantaa's Myyrmanni in October 2002. Pooling information online and in real-time, a number of young Internauts were well ahead of the mainstream media in determining the identity of the perpetrator, and indeed they possibly provided the police themselves with useful information. This somewhat ironically coincided with widespread public concern about activities on such boards, as the lone bomber had himself been a prolific poster on one discussion forum that revolved around homemade explosives.

More on this subject:
 BACKGROUND: Stolen goods among the items sold over the Net

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Myyrmanni: Net detectives found the bomber by themselves (20.10.2002, most external links no longer work)

LASSE KERKELÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
lasse.kerkela@hs.fi