Black market fuels brazen laptop thefts

There’s a growing wariness among the students, graduates and workers who hunch over steaming cups of artisanal coffee and glowing laptop computer screens at Bay Area cafes.

Their Macbooks and Dells have become prime targets for coffee-shop bandits who strike day or night, often in groups, and flee in mere seconds, motivated by a black market hungry for laptops that can be scrubbed of data and shipped overseas. Tragedies like the Oakland engineer who died New Year’s

Eve chasing men who police say grabbed his laptop at a Starbucks are never far from their minds.

“I’m a lot more aware of it,” said Danny Nuch, 23, a San Jose State computer engineering graduate student, as he worked on his Dell over a coffee at Philz near campus. He makes sure not to leave his laptop unattended, even taking it with him to the restroom if a friend isn’t with him to watch it. “This is super precious to me.”

The recent Oakland robbery was one of several brazen thefts at Bay Area cafes, restaurants and other public places that have laptop owners on edge. Some have been captured on video, including one Nov. 6 at a San Jose Paris Baguette and another in June 2018 at Berkeley’s Caffe Strada.

Hundreds of angry and worried Oakland residents packed a public safety meeting near the Starbucks struck on New Year’s Eve, where Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley conceded such thefts are “happening way too often.”

It’s hard to say whether laptop thefts are on the rise because they don’t fit neatly into the broad crime categories law enforcement agencies track and report each year to the FBI. They could be recorded as robberies if the computers are forcibly taken from their owners, or as thefts if they are swiped while unattended or in a smash-and-grab from a car.

But law enforcement officials say stolen laptops have been a hot commodity on the black market and a top target in auto burglaries, which have risen throughout much of the Bay Area, in part because computers are more likely to be left in a car than a cellphone, purse or wallet.

“Unfortunately, it’s so easy to take a laptop, and so easy to flip it,” said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Marisa McKeown.