Terri Vary has been sentenced to 7 months imprisonment at Isleworth Crown Court, just outside London, for receiving stolen goods.
She denied all knowledge of one of the items, a Sony Vaio laptop she was accused of handling and which was never found. But unknown to her, the laptop had EvoForesight monitoring software installed. As soon as Vary received the laptop and started using it, everything she used it for was monitored and recorded.
The software collected included her home address, credit card details and passwords to social networking sites through keylogging. It also recorded all emails sent and received, IM/Chat messaging, websites visited and searches made.
As the Vaio was never recovered, the guilty verdict was achieved solely on the basis of monitored data from the laptop. Police did not have the laptop as evidence for the prosecution.
Vary originally pleaded not guilty to receiving the stolen laptop, later claiming that the laptop was broken and she had thrown it away. but the monitored data proved that she had in fact been using the machine.
EvoSquare, the company behind the monitoring tool, says the product is principally aimed at protecting kids by providing parents with a simple system to record emails, webmail, instant messages, chat room activities, web-cam usage, websites visited and software used on home computers.
