It isn’t often that you hear about a stolen laptop being returned to its rightful owner — but still, that’s not really news. Toss in a police raid in Argentina and the recovery of about a $1 million in counterfeit U.S. bills — now you have a story.

It certainly isn’t a story that Gleb Budman, the co-founder of the automated backup service Backblaze, could have possibly imagined might some day be one of his company’s success stories. Not that they weren’t already doing just fine.

“We’ve already had a couple of people recover their stolen laptops,” Budman told Wired.com. “But I did not expect this to come out of it. This was lucky on all fronts.”

That’s putting it mildly. But the upside of the Law of Unintended Consequence is that this sort of thing is going to happen more often in our increasingly connected digital universe.

Backblaze, which costs $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited backup of hard drives and external drives, works through software on a user’s computer that continually backs up data to Backblaze’s custom data center. Customers can use the service to recover deleted versions of files (say, for example, you edit a photo and then save it over the old one) or to restore data in the case of a hard-drive failure or theft. 

So, if a thief steals a laptop, logs onto the net and starts using it, any new files made are quietly uploaded to the service, and the owner, armed with their password, can see them.

A few recoveries were made using this indirect tracking technique — including one where a thief was busted after the rightful owner found a term paper with the culprit’s name on it uploaded.

About a month and a half ago, Backblaze decided to release a proper tracking tool that lets it users see the IP address of their computer and displays its location on a map.

This week, Budman got an e-mail from an Argentinian user whose laptop had been stolen. The Argentinian, who requested anonymity, had turned over the tracking information he got to the police, who raided the house. Inside, police found seven people, the stolen computer and a safe with 2,500 sheets of counterfeit sheets of money — four $100 bills on each, roughly equivalent to a million dollars.

According to Argentinian news reports, the police suspect the group weren’t the counterfeiters, but instead were the ones tasked with passing the bills. They arrested one and detained six others — but handed the computer back to its owner, who is asking to be anonymous for fear of retribution.

This wouldn’t be the first high-profile recovery of a computer using Backblaze’s service. In the internet-famous case of Mark Bao’s stolen Macbook, the thief made a video of himself dancing. Bao, who has a big following online, found the video using Backblaze and posted the video on YouTube, where to date it has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

The thief immediately begged for the video to come down and turned himself in. The thief was arrested and prosecuted, and Bao got his laptop back.

Backblaze isn’t alone in tracking stolen electronics. Prey, an open source tool, offers users the ability to remotely wipe devices and take snapshots using built-in cameras. A wide range of other software tools, some free and some that cost, do the same thing.

But Backblaze can legitimately claim it’s the only one of them that has managed to infiltrate a counterfeiting ring.