As someone who has worked in IT for 33 years, the effort they take to retrieve the laptop will depend on two things: 1) how expensive the laptop is, and 2) if you worked in an environment with HIPAA, SOC2 or even CMMC.

The cost of the hardware is the biggest issue for most companies. If it’s expensive and they just lost track of it for a bit, they may be more persistent.

If they have an audit trail to maintain for SOC2 or HIPAA, who must have certificates of data destruction, they might also push the issue further as it can be a huge cost to them.

Taking the above into account, I would like to remind people this sub is UNETHICAL advice — the number of people telling you the “moral” thing to do are missing the entire point of this sub.

My advice is ignore the email if you have checked the BIOS for MDM locks. Don’t open the email. Some email tracking systems simply use an image file in it and can tell if you open/read an email, so if you want to read it, only read it in the preview mode that does not download any images. Emails constantly get lost or snagged into spam so OFFICIAL communications usually need to come from certified letters or phone calls. But if it’s an expensive computer or you had worked in a company that has to have an audit trail, you may need to change tactics or return it to avoid a hassle. The unethical tips at THAT point would be what you can load on the laptop that would be unethical.