35-year-old Kariem McFarlin, the guy who entered the late Steve Jobs’ Palo Alto home and stole thousands of dollars worth of Apple products and other items last year, is going to spend at least a few years in the slammer.
A Judge has just sentenced McFarlin to 7 years in a California state penitentiary.
McFarlin was arrested back in August of 2012, and couple of weeks after he broke into the late Apple co-founder’s home and stole more than $60,000 worth of Apple products and personal items. It was later revealed that McFarlin took 2 iMacs, 3 iPads, 3 iPods, an Apple TV box, and some of Jobs’ wife’s jewelry.
It doesn’t appear that the robber singled out Steve Jobs’ home because it belonged to Steve Jobs. Jobs’ home wasn’t the only home that McFarlin had burgled recently. Upon admitting to the Jobs job, he also admitted to hitting multiples homes in the San Francisco Bay area and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of items.
McFarlin was captured a few weeks after the burglaries with the help of Apple and an area tech-crime unit. MacWorld UK has the story:
[McFarlin] was arrested in August last year by officers from the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a Silicon Valley-based high-tech crime unit formed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
REACT officers found McFarlin with help from Apple security, which tracked where the stolen devices were being used by matching their serial numbers with connections to Apple iTunes servers. The IP address in use matched a line in McFarlin’s apartment in nearby Alameda that was also being used by an Apple device registered to a member of his family, according to a police report.
And thus a reminder for criminals on why tech theft is such a risky proposition.
