Dulles traveler tells how she found her stolen laptop and helped track down the thief

Heading home for the holidays took an unexpected turn for a young woman flying through Dulles International Airport. Someone stole her backpack.

“The most important thing, though, was my laptop, which I’d had for 10 years,” said “Jane.” She asked the News4 I-Team not to identify her, since she was the victim of a crime.

Jane, a Virginia native who now lives elsewhere, reported the theft last year to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA).

Jane said MWAA told her the theft may have been caught on camera, but they weren’t confident they would be able to identify the person. On any given day, more than 60,000 passengers pass through Dulles.

But it turned out that identifying the suspect was easy. According to the police report, the person caught on surveillance video stealing her backpack worked at the airport for Smart Carte, the company that provides self-serve luggage carts for passengers.

The News4 I-Team learned that although police identified the employee, he was not immediately arrested and was allowed to stay on the job for more than a month while the investigation continued.

“They couldn’t arrest him yet because they needed more in order to get a search warrant to get my computer back,” Jane said.

Then an unexpected message changed everything. Jane said she woke up one morning to a text from an anonymous Instagram account. When she opened it, she found a nude photo of herself.

Jane said she had no doubt where the photo came from. It was part of an art project stored on her laptop, and she said she hadn’t sent it to anyone.

Jane contacted the MWAA investigator working her case and was told that if she felt comfortable, she should try to talk to the person who sent her the message.

“I really didn’t want to, but I wanted to get my computer back,” she said.

Jane did as the officer asked and started up a conversation, which she shared with the I-Team.

“I asked him, ‘What do you want?’”

He responded, “More of your photos.”

Then things took another turn. The person asked for money.

“He asked me for $3,000,” Jane said. “I think he just saw an opportunity to try and blackmail me. I was very upset. I’d never been in a situation like this before.”

Wanting to take control of the situation, Jane decided to do her own detective work. Using an online search tool, she figured out the suspect’s IP address and even his GPS coordinates.

“It came back as an IP address registered in Springfield, Virginia,” she said.

She passed that information on to police, who did surveillance and eventually obtained a search warrant.

But this could have gone a different way, according to Fernando Uribe, a special agent at the FBI who works sextortion cases like this. He said normally a victim would not be encouraged to communicate with the person exploiting them.

“We don’t know these individuals’ expertise online, right? They might be very good at manipulating electronic media, or they might just understand what she’s trying to do and then the scheme could get worse,” said Uribe.

Rob Yingling, a MWAA spokesperson, defended the decision to pull Jane into the investigation, saying their officers are fully trained, just like police who work in local communities.

“All I can say is, our police worked with the victim to obtain actionable evidence that they were able to move forward with a solid case,” he said.

Police eventually arrested the suspect and recovered Jane’s laptop, although it had been wiped clean.

“For an investigative process to play out in a lawful way, you have to be very methodical,” Yingling said. “There's a lot of inner agency work that also takes place, because this investigation left the campus of the airport.”

Jane sued the suspect in small claims court, hoping to recoup the cost of the laptop and be compensated for the emotional distress it brought her.

“My motivation was never to send someone to jail. It was to get some form of justice for what I lost,” she said.

The two parties eventually settled the case, Jane said.

The News4 I-Team tried contacting the man accused of stealing her laptop but was unsuccessful. He was arrested and faced a number of charges, including threat to extort money. However, prosecutors dismissed those charges after he pleaded guilty to petit larceny and received 12 months of probation.

A spokesperson for Smarte Carte told the I-Team, “While law enforcement did not provide Smarte Carte with details of this investigation, Smarte Carte fully cooperates with law enforcement whenever called upon.”

Smarte Carte terminated the man's employment after MWAA suspended his security badge.