Want to find a Lost or Stolen Camera?

Did a quick search on the forums and couldn't find a link to this site; http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/listmodels

I think it is somthing everyone with a digital camera should have bookmarked.

I tend to lurk rarther than post so hope this is the right section of the forums.

I tried this and similar services and they are next to useless, in my opinion. Unfortunately - as my signature below indicates, it is a service I could have used! And lets say you DO locate some images taken with your stolen camera, then what? No chance police anywhere would care to do anything about it.

I do think that camera makers could be more proactive in dealing with thefts. For instance, I would like Pentax to have something as simple as a service where you can report your gear as stolen. With gps and stuff there should be various possibilities to make hardwired solutions.

In general I think Pentax (and CaNikon etc.) with just a little effort could make it less attractive to steal cameras by making it harder to sell on the black market.

Something that would help a lot to retrieve stolen goods would be a central registry of stolen items with serial numbers. Service centres could consult the registry when servicing goods to see if it was stolen, and, if so, report it to the proper authorities. Selling stolen goods would then be a lot less interesting.

I agree, that would be the first thing to do. And since Pentax wants you to register when you buy something, I was surprised that this was not already possible. It would be a service that don't make Pentax money here and now, so I don't expect anything.

This is all very well, but it would also mean a lot of inconvenience when buying and selling second hand kit. Project it forwards and HMRC would be totting up what you bought things for, when, what you got when you sold them, how much tax was due....I realise that's a long projection, but it's not impossible and after all, income tax was only a temporary measure to pay for the Napoleonic War.....

More control? No thank you, not considering that the percentage loss, however galling when it happens, is very low. In any event, to have such a register of items (not just Pentax) would carry an immense cost that we would have to pay for.

The service can work!

I followed a thread on another forum where a member had his Canon 5D returned after it was stolen in 2007. He used the service to search for photos taken with his stolen camera, he found some on Flickr, did a bit of cyber sleuthing and find the person's facebook page, address, phone number, employer, shoe size etc. He passed on the details to the New South Wales police who went and interviewed the person, who admitted to having the camera (he bought it for $1,000)which he had to surrender.

Moral of the story, if you buy a ridiculously cheap camera from a bloke in the pub, strip the exif before you upload pictures and don't depend on Facebook's default security settings.

I would have thought a better moral would be don't buy a ridiculously cheap camera from a bloke in the pub?

SECOND THAT
Regartds
Dave

Didn't the subject of finding stolen cameras come up sometime during 2011 with a website/programme which scanned for exif data.

regards
Bernard

There's curious for you.

I followed the link above and fed in the serial number of my K10D, just to see what it found.

It presented me with a single line table as follows :-


date serial make model page url image url
2011-04-24 3443292 nikon corporation nikon d80 page* image*


so .......


Bernard

had you reported your K10D lost, stolen or found?

No, I merely fed in the serial number of my K10D to see if it would find any pics I'd posted anywhere. It found a camera with the same serial number (3443292) - a Nikon owned by a Zen group in California, so hardly a crime syndicate and my camera is along side me now anyway.

My conclusion is that the premise of finding a lost camera is flawed if there are overlaps in serial numbers twixt camera manufacturers.

Bernard