Here is a fantastic tale of ingenious detective work.
Would be thieves of iMacs, beware! You’d better make sure that the previous owner doesn’t have a smart hacker brother who (with help from an online community) can activate Applescripts to delete sensitive information and report back with your phone number.
Enjoy reading the story, mostly pieced together from newsgroup postings, but whatever you do, *don’t* touch those Applescripts. You really don’t want to try this at home, kids.