Two alleged thieves were found with stolen computer and A/V gear taken from three roommates in White Plains, N.Y., because one of the victims is a Mac expert. She used the notoriously hard-to-get-working Back to My Mac feature in Leopard which allows single sign-in to .Mac for remote, secure access to all computers on which you’ve signed in. (It uses UPnP/NAT-PMP, wide-area Bonjour, dynamic DNS, and IPsec’s IKE coupled with IPv6 tunneling. Any surprise it’s wonky? It’s cool when it works, though.)

The unnamed victim in question was able to use remote screen sharing to capture a picture of one alleged burglar via the machine’s built-in iSight camera, and copied photos on the computer that apparently were of the other alleged thief.

One of the other roommates recognized the two alleged perps from a party at their apartment (they were friends of a friend), told the police, who tracked them down, and made the arrests, finding all the stolen gear in the process.

While I’ve heard of plenty of Webcams-lead-to-capture stories, this is the first story that ties in IPv6 and recovered gear that I know of.

(Via Boing Boing.)