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posted by
martyb
on Saturday August 15 2015, @08:02PM
from the rats-got-bored-running-through-mazes dept.
from the rats-got-bored-running-through-mazes dept.
The Buffalo News Police Blotter reports that a pair of thieves stole Xbox wireless controllers and police tracked them down by contacting the manufacturer. Maybe this is standard operating procedure for the cops, but it was new to this submitter. Any idea of the mechanism(s) involved?
No explicit mention of Microsoft — perhaps these controllers were made by a third party to work with Xbox.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2015, @08:33PM
~$50 per controller? Sounds like genuine Microsoft® Xbox.
Anonymous Coward must live in New York because I don't see this story in the tech press..
http://wivb.com/2015/08/13/high-tech-investigation-leads-police-to-arrest-alleged-walmart-thieves/ [wivb.com]
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(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday August 15 2015, @09:02PM
what's surprising about this?
walmart tracks the serial numbers of the devices, likely via an rfid sticker in the box [likely put there by MS and linked to the controllers unique serial number] and the XBox reports the serial numbers of itself and all connected controllers to Microsoft, and it's all associated to an xbox account with user name and possibly address and credit card info.
It probably would have been made slightly more difficult if they didn't have a credit card/address for the account, and had to to a lookup of the physical address from the ip-address.