My relentless pursuit of the guy who robbed me
A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down In the first 24 hours after someone broke into my car in my own driveway, I was mostly mad at my husband.
Context & Ripple Effects
This essay lands on a recognizable beat: the crime victim who turns the open web into a case file. A San Francisco Chronicle piece back in June 2007 showed an ID-theft victim snaring her own thief, and in September 2009 a West Virginia burglar literally left his Facebook page logged in on his target's computer — so by late 2010, tracking your own perpetrator through public profiles was an established genre, not a novelty.
What makes this telling distinct is its toolkit and timing. The author works through Craigslist, MySpace and a dating site within 24 hours of the driveway break-in — the same month Craigslist yanked its adult services section behind a 'censored' logo amid claims from some analysts that the move was a publicity stunt, and months after a July 2010 federal lawsuit alleged computer-intrusion violations by major sites including MySpace. Meanwhile MySpace itself hit an all-time low of 50.2 million monthly uniques per May 2010 reporting, meaning the platform serving as the detective's database is also one losing its audience.
First-order effects
- The thief is identifiable within a day because his public profiles — MySpace, a dating site — do the investigative work police response times don't, shifting the burden of initial identification onto the victim.
- Craigslist and MySpace function here as free reconnaissance infrastructure for private citizens, with no consent or verification step between a stolen car and a stranger mining those accounts.
Second-order effects
- Every high-profile success like this one raises the stakes for platforms already under legal scrutiny — the July 2010 federal suit over computer-intrusion law that names MySpace among defendants shows courts are already deciding where profile-based lookups cross the line.
- For MySpace specifically, stories like this cut both ways: it demonstrates residual cultural utility as a searchable identity graph even as its audience shrinks toward that 50.2 million-visitor floor analysts flagged in May 2010.
Third-order effects
- If victim-led digital sleuthing keeps proving faster than official channels, expect pressure on both sides: platforms pushed toward tighter default privacy, and police forced to treat citizens' crowdsourced evidence as routine intake rather than anomaly.
- The pattern points toward a structural trade-off in which the same open profiles that let a wronged party find a stranger also let anyone find anyone — normalizing do-it-yourself investigation as a civic skill with no agreed legal boundaries, a question the courts were already circling in 2010.
The trend: As social profiles became searchable identity databases in the late 2000s, ordinary crime victims increasingly did their own detective work online — ahead of both law enforcement and the privacy law meant to govern it.