The laptop that left Victoria
It happened — 2026Metropolitan Police, June 2026
Even after a crackdown the Met calls a success, London logged 71,391 stolen phones in 2025 — and one police operation seized 200 laptops packed for smuggling. Westminster, where we're based, was the epicentre.
Your version of this starts on an ordinary Thursday. There are eight of you, and the laptops go wherever the work goes — client meetings, the café downstairs, home for the weekend. At lunchtime one of them is left on a chair for a moment, and then it's gone. The first hour disappears into phone calls and retraced steps. Then the harder questions arrive: can whoever has it log in? Was the disk encrypted? Which client folders were synced to it? In most firms this size, nobody can answer with certainty — and that uncertainty, more than the missing hardware, is what makes the afternoon frightening.
This is you if There's no list of company devices, let alone serial numbers; “Encrypted?” would take a day to answer, per laptop; people use personal machines for company mail.
How we run it
When you call, we sign the laptop out of everything.
Changing the password isn't enough on its own, because the machine's saved sign-ins keep working without it. So we start at the server end: every session revoked, then the password reset behind it. From that moment, whoever has the laptop is locked out of your email and your files.
Then we wipe it, from here.
If the machine is enrolled in device management — something we set up with every client on day one, agreed with the team — we send it a wipe command. Within minutes, wherever it is, it empties itself. The thief is left holding hardware, and nothing else.
The same afternoon, we answer the ICO question.
A stolen laptop with personal data on it can be a reportable breach, and the law gives you 72 hours to decide. Because we can show the disk was encrypted and the machine was wiped, the answer is almost always “nothing to report” — and we put it in writing, so you're not making that judgement alone.
And we make the police report a five-minute job.
The serial number comes off the asset list we keep for you, not from anyone's memory. You have a crime reference number the same day; your insurer will ask for it.
Made boring by: the device baseline that comes with every plan — encryption checked machine by machine, remote wipe ready before it's needed, passwords in a manager, and nothing that lives only on one laptop. Core · from £39/user/month
Real event: Met Police, Jun 2026. The eight-person firm is illustrative.