Are Laptop Thieves Becoming More Brazen?

This Craigslist posting was recently distributed on the SF Indie Politics mail list:


For the second time in two months, I have been sitting next to someone
in a cafe whose laptop was literally wrenched out of their hands. The
first time was at Bean There on Waller and Steiner right before
Halloween, the second was today at Jumpin' Java on Noe near 14th.

In both cases, the culprits were trios of African-American teenagers,
usually dressed in black. Their standard M.O. is to enter the cafe, buy
something at the counter, then as they leave, to grab the laptop
computer nearest to the front exit before they dash out. The two who
took the laptop tonight had a third accomplice who drove a getaway car,
a weatherbeaten gray and black Honda Accord. Within minutes of the
first theft, they hit a second cafe not far away from the first.

The police on the scene mentioned that there has been a rash of these
thefts. A first group was caught earlier in the year, and now a second
group seems to have taken over. Any cafe within spitting distance of
the Fillmore district seems unsafe. Laptops are usually resold on the
street, or even in Oakland.

If you use a laptop in a cafe, you should be extremely careful. I am
probably going to buy a cable-lock for my own computer, which can be
locked to the leg of any cafe table I use. Avoid sitting near the front
door if using your cafe at a laptop. In both thefts I witnessed, the
laptops were both running on battery power, meaning that there were no
plugged-in cables to hinder the thieves from grabbing the devices.

And back up your data! Tonight's victim was a software developer who
told me the laptop was unimportant compared to the extremely valuable
data that was on it.

Any corroboration to this? I know your laptop is likely to disappear if you leave it for a while at Starbuck's but this is ridiculous...