I was visiting with a high-ranking official in a Denver, Colorado metro area police department. We were talking about laptop theft, and he told me a story that he said is all too common.

The police pull over a suspect, probably for a routine traffic violation. In the suspect’s trunk are five laptops, six iPhones, and some other electronic gear. Either this person is Santa Clause in disguise, or we have a “situation” on our hands with a trunk full of stolen property. The officer runs a check on serial numbers from the equipment, against the police report database.

Guess what? No matches.

The officer knows full well that these goods are as hot as a new Hannah Montana show (for certain folks, anyway). But that pesky limit called “probable cause,” a nice protection of living in the USA, requires the officer to let the suspect go.

If your stolen laptop was in that trunk, and if you had recorded your serial number and reported it to police in your filed police report, your unit would have flagged red, and good things would happen, starting with an arrest.

Unfortunately, even businesses have a habit of failing to record this key information–the serial number.

The MyLaptopGPS system comes with a built-in property registry (called SafeRegistry) that allows the registration of virtually any kind of property, unlimited, with all kinds of pertinent data fields–beginning with the serial number. We do this for a reason. My point here isn’t merely to toot our own horn, but to reiterate that recording serial numbers is the FIRST thing any business or individual should do with valuable property. That alone could be the difference between a recovery and…nothing.