An Iowa police officer has developed a sniffing software that helps police find more stolen properties. L8NT (short for Latent analysis of 802.11 Network Traffic) is a specialized wireless dongle with a suitable antenna that scans for and locates MAC addresses associated with the known stolen devices. The traditional method used by law enforcement for recovering lost or stolen devices is to physically examine the device to obtain the model and serial number, but it is extremely difficult because of Constitutional search and seizure issues.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/track-stolen-devices.html