Tracing a stolen iMac

[shmwy]

Over this last weekend my apartment was broken into and my iMac was stolen. The door was kicked in, but the front door, which requires key card access was not forced. This leads me to believe it was one of my roommates (who are all strangers to me). Obviously I am quite upset over this loss, as it had all of my most important information on it.

I was writing to ask whether there is any way to track the computer with its MAC address. I have this piece of information only, unfortunately, as it was a second hand buy and I never wrote down the serial number. I also have an iPod that was tethered to the iMac and I don't know if I can find the serial number of the computer from the iPod or not.

Any help at all is much appreciated, and hopefully I can get my computer back, as all of my finals are next week!

 

[wrinkster22]

ohh that sucks! do you have iCloud? If you do find my mac would likley be set up.

 

[shmwy]

no unfortunately I don't have anything installed that could track the computer. Hopefully I can somehow prove it was my roommate

 

[johnjay1776]

Try opening a console window and looking at the ARP table for your machine. If the stolen iMac is on the same LAN as you are then you'll see your stolen iMac's MAC address in the arp table.

If this were AIX UNIX, I'd tell you to do an "arp -a" but I am not sure what the equivalent command is for OS/X. A quick look on the web would tell you though. There are also "network discovery" applications that could help you here too ... Look for an app called "iNet" in the App Store.

 

[eljanitor]

Sorry to hear about this. I'd say you should call Apple with questions like this. I would imagine that you have the original receipt for your iMac which may help in some way. I also hope you went to your local police station and filed a police report about all of this, otherwise chances are nobody is going to do much for you.

 

[wpotere]

Nope, MAC address will do nothing for you and neither will Apple. You need to file a police report and hopefully you have insurance so that you can get it replaced. Most likely the police will do little for you either to be honest. The report is more for the insurance but if there have been a rash of theft in your area at least they will have your information if they do recover the stolen merchandise.

You might monitor Craig's list in your area but it will be hard to do without a serial number as you can't prove it was yours.