I’ve told this story many times since. I get a lot of reactions, because it’s a strange tale – to think you could find out so much online about a thief, to think what a bizarre wormhole I found into one stranger’s life. But what took me a long time to realize, what I missed at first amid my drama of violation and vengeance, was the remarkable displays of kindness I experienced from absolute strangers – people who retrieved scraps of paper from lawns, picked up piles of discarded cards from a dirty train station floor, drove miles to restore someone’s belongings, searched Facebook to find me. If I were mathematically inclined, I might even observe that in my tale, the good guys outnumbered the bad guys, by about 10 to one.

Amanda Enayati – http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/09/20/tracked_down_my_thief/index.html