Stupid Laptop Thief iChats With Owner's Friends
Say cheese!
If you steal someone's laptop, it's probably a good idea not to identify yourself on the original owner's contact list or social networks. Of course, not every thief has that sort of common sense.
One burglar suspected of stealing four laptops made himself seen when he used one of the computers, a MacBook, to log onto the original owner's iChat account. One of the victim's friends chatted up the now stolen iChat account and was able to use the webcam chat to capture images of one of the suspected thieves and what appears to be his bedroom.
Here it is:

This man is believed to have broken into a house on Three Mile Harbor Drive in East Hampton, L.I. and stolen $30,000 worth of items.
Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $5,000 for info leading to an arrest – call 1-800-220-TIPS.
(Source: Gothamist.)
Not to mention that if this was a PC laptop, he could have just wiped the hard drive and re-installed windows, then this wouldn't have happened, just sayin...
anyways hes stupid in the way that he was walking around for 20 minutes, rejecting any assistance, just looking around, whilst there were 16 camera's pointed straight at him...
He threatened me not to go after him, so I called the cops on him... he was on a bicicle, in the middle of a busy city, with cops around every corner... too bad they didn't catch him then though...
afterwards we took the images to the police and they instantly recognised the guy, and went to pick him up! They knew where he lived! gotta love CCTV facial recognition!
If it is stolen you can go to a website on another machine, login, report as stolen and the next time the machine gets booted up it starts recording everything, its GPS location, the network it is connected to, audio & video recording, everything.
It needs to be embedded in the mobo somehow, not on the hard drive, so even a reformat or reinstall wont protect the thief.
There is at least one software company, Absolute, located in Canada which makes just such software. It is very effective and doesn't get wiped if the HD is reformatted.
Obviously no girlfriend...
I have seen similar things for "lo-jacking" a laptop via software, but it should just be automatic, direct from the factory rather that being down to the customer.