Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds? It must be true, it’s all over the Internet! The oldest mention I can find of that factoid dates from 2009. At the time, the supposed source was the FBI, without any citation. Lately it’s usually Gartner, still with no citation.

Phantom statistics

Recently a customer asked me to include that “statistic” in an article. Fortunately, it wasn’t a requirement, just a suggestion. The customer also wanted all links to be no more than a year old, so citing a nine-year-old figure didn’t really seem like what they wanted. Even if the figure was once accurate, the theft rate is sure to have changed over the years.
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