I know that cell phones can be flagged as stolen and the IDs locked out. On a different note if someone steals a bunch of new in the box notebook PCs from a shipping container or retail store with the intent of re-selling them on eBay or Craig’s List etc., are any manufacturers willing to put that PC on a watch list if they are sent in for service so the theft can be reported to the police?
I can’t respond in general, but lots of the components in computers have id codes etched onto their packages, and lots of companies track these. I don’t know about them being stolen, but counterfeiting slow memories and making them look like faster memories is, as is rejected parts which get stolen out of the reject bin and then sold. If the ids of stolen parts were recorded, which I’d expect they would be, then they would turn up.
I know Cisco was able to prove in court that parts sent in for warranty repairs were counterfeit by demonstrating that the serial numbers were not in the range of ones they actually used.
This record keeping is not only for theft. Say you discover that a given lot of a component is prone to failure. You want to be able replace the at-risk parts, and not all of them.
BTW, the bar code on a bottle of wine lets you trace where the cork came from, the vats the wine was aged in, and all the grapes that were used for making that wine within a few hundred meters of their growing point or less. Not directly, the bar code is a pointer into lots of databases. We used this to shame people in our company into supporting the same kind of traceability.
I’ve seen it happen. In '98 or so, our bench engineer was asked to arrange the repair of the personal laptop belonging to the CTO of a major customer. This laptop had been privately sold to the CTO by the IT Manager, a woman who had been making our lives difficult contractually and personally and whose bona fides were doubtful. The laptop manufacturer responded to the repair request by noting that the laptop had been registered to the IT Managers previous employer (another of our customers) and was listed as stolen.
Needless to say, her employment was quietly terminated. A few years later, the same bench engineer visited a third (somewhat remote and very recent) customer and spotted their (also new) IT Manager. It was the same woman with a new name and faked CV. She did not last long there, either.
Si