FLORIDA COMPUTER THEFT AT AIRPORTS Southwest Florida International listed among airports with most stolen laptops : Midfield Terminal : Naples Daily News:

Southwest Florida International listed among airports with most stolen laptops

By NAPLES DAILY NEWS STAFF
1:28 p.m., Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Southwest Florida International Airport has made a list it won't be proud of.

It's among the top five medium-sized airports, out of a total 70 airports of that size, that were studied for stolen laptop computers.

Joining Southwest Florida International are airports in San Jose, Calif.; Austin, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; and Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood.

Miami is among the top five large U.S. airports in laptop thefts, joining Los Angeles, JFK in New York City, Chicago's O'Hare and Newark, N.J.

The market-research-firm the Ponemon Institute, on behalf of computer producer Dell, conducted the research.

Airports are among the top locations from which thieves look to steal notebook computers, along with parked cars and hotels, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. And the confusion at airport security checkpoints apparently give crooks those few seconds to grab a computer that has been removed from a bag for scanning and be gone.

Some 637,000 laptop computers are stolen each year from medium- and large-sized airports in the United States, and on average more than two-thirds of those machines are never returned to their rightful owners, according to the research.

That comes to 10,278 stolen or missing laptops a week from 36 of America's largest airports, and nearly 2,000 missing notebooks per week from 70 medium-sized airports such as Southwest Florida International.

Go to naplesnews.com for more updates on this story.