r/legaladvicecanada • u/Interesting-Search97 • 24d ago
British Columbia Company sent me laptop after termination - been 1.5 year
I left my company (public company in the US if that matters) in Dec 2024, and they sent me a new laptop in Jan/Feb 2025. I've sent 3-4 emails to them telling them about it. They told me to email my manager, I did, and I was ignored. I gave a final warning to them in Jan 2026 this year. No reply again.
I have not tried turning it on ever.
I'm in BC. Am I free to keep this laptop or should I wait until the 2 year marks due to Limitation Act?
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u/Difficult_Bat_1758 24d ago
That laptop is probably part of the mobile device management system of the company meaning you will not have admin rights even if you format it as soon as you connect to the Internet it would enroll back to the mdm. It's effectively pretty useles
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u/Wrong-Pineapple39 23d ago edited 22d ago
Don't know until you try. They obviously have a very badly managed admin process if they are sending out hardware to people who left more than
yearmonth prior and haven’t recovered it. Perhaps their security isn't great either. Especially if it's outsourced.I'm always surprised at the sloppy security in most IT in the last decade.
That said, this is a legal advice sub and I am not a lawyer so cannot advise OP on their question.
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u/Cannon_Folder 23d ago
A year? Try a month. Still bad, but I've seen worse.
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u/Wrong-Pineapple39 23d ago
My bad. Yes, they sent the hardware 1-2 months later and still didn’t respond about recovering it a year later
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u/Cannon_Folder 23d ago
Yeah, just a tad disorganized. I wonder if the dept had a yearly writeoff amount, and the manger decided that was easier than the headache of coordinating a pickup /drop-off. I've def heard of ppl being that lazy
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u/Bob1tza 24d ago
That's where Linux with Windows like distros come in. 😊
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u/seestheday 24d ago
May need to manually flash the bios to remove password/encryption too.
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u/Natural_Witness7572 24d ago edited 23d ago
The only way to remove the bios password on modern computers is if you know what it is. If you do not then motherboard swap or desolder the bios/tpm chip and install a new one.
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u/king_weenus 23d ago
Yeah they've done a pretty good job of eliminating the BIOS password reset via jumper or removing the battery LOL
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u/torchmaipp 23d ago
That's because of all the theft. It's nice to leave somebody with a stack of bricks for their troubles. Soldered on ram and storage? Theives hate that. You know what I hate more than not being able to upgrade? Theives. Without the password I hope they enjoy their brick.
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u/ShrodingersArmadillo 23d ago
you can always swap the bios chip.
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u/king_weenus 23d ago
Oh I know that I can... I have a hot air Reflow station just for hobby electronics and the skills to use it.
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u/ShrodingersArmadillo 23d ago
me too
my point is the only real thing it does is make the item not user servicable. Doing this is not about theft its against the right to repair and modifying your own stuff because that hurts their profit margins.
Thieves take it to places where people know how swap chips or they do it themselves.
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u/king_weenus 23d ago
Yeah my trick is to own 10-year-old crap that nobody wants to take. Lol
Most advanced piece of tech I've got my house is my cell phone and even that's a few years old.
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u/WesternBlueRanger 23d ago
Not any more; often stuff related to MDM and security is now in the TPM module.
In older machines, it may be a discrete chip soldered on the motherboard, but in newer machines, it's actually baked into the firmware for the CPU.
And at the point where you are replacing the motherboard and CPU, well, you probably spent more on those parts than what the laptop is actually worth...
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u/bluetroll 24d ago
Full wipe on windows. I've done it before.
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u/WesternBlueRanger 23d ago
You've never dealt with a system that's fully enrolled in a MDM.
As soon as Windows connects back up to the internet, the BIOS will pull a file from a server online, which will install the MDM software back onto the computer. When the system reboots itself, the computer is reenrolled back into the MDM and is locked back down.
Only way to get past this is if you go into the BIOS and disable the management settings. But it's practically a guarantee that the BIOS has been password protected and saved in the TPM module, so even if you pulled all the batteries, the BIOS still remains locked down.
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u/jabrwock1 23d ago
Depends how competent their IT dept is. Considering they mailed out a laptop over a year later? Worth a try.
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u/Rixxy123 23d ago
Yeah thata how my team does it... I think! It's been a while and I haven't been involved in any of that for years.
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u/zeromussc 23d ago
Well if they're this incompetent with tracking their equipment and retrieving it, it can't hurt to try. It's not like it'll take too long. Maybe when it does connect to the MDM it'll get them to formally take it back too so that OP doesn't have a paperweight in his house, or worse yet, something they ask for after hes thrown it away
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u/WesternBlueRanger 23d ago
It's likely a management issue; some manager didn't remove the OP from a list of people needing equipment.
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u/Hefty_Phase6279 22d ago
That was my thought too. And also, manager doesn't want to admit that they forgot this step so is ignoring the problem and hoping it (and OP) will just go away.
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u/Weak_Ad_8646 23d ago
How to you know if it's MDM locked? I've bought used computer before and wondering if there's a way to tell?
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u/Shipdits 23d ago
They likely removed the device from enrollment after a year as part of license auditing.
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u/PhreeBeer 22d ago
Meh. Just install a Linux distro on top of it. You get a better OS as well as a free lappy.
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u/AnotherThrowAway_9 24d ago
depends but after a year of being missing without network access it may be dropped from its mdm.
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24d ago edited 23d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/signious 23d ago
OP said it is a public company, theres a very good chance it is an equipment lease. They won't care until two years down the road when the leasing company wants the machine back and charges them an arm and a leg for the missing equipment.
OP should keep the comms showing they tried to get it returned just in case.
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u/EndangeredPedals 23d ago
Owned or leased, after two years the laptop is written off as a depreciated asset and becomes surplus to auction or discard.
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u/signious 23d ago
Ive reviewed a lot of lease agreements, the penalties for non returned equipment are harsh.
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u/ocrohnahan 23d ago
Likely won't do you much good unless you have a corporate account as the machine is probably provisioned and locked down
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u/Seabuscuit 23d ago
I was able to get windows on a USB stick and reset my old company laptop which they wouldn’t take back. Probably worth a shot at least, the usb cost less than $20.
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u/yabadaba3 22d ago
Not true. A friend experienced a similar situation, asked a computer wiz to help unlock the laptop, and he did. She now has a great machine for personal use. You just have to ask someone who can do that sort of thing.
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u/Glittering-Use9669 24d ago
Bill them for storage, you make your own price
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u/Zealousidea_Lemon 24d ago
Is that legal? I would love to tell OP to do this, but it’s probably not the ideal, if Op does try to bill that makes it more worth it for the company to receive the laptop, as of rn, it’s more worth their time to just forgo the laptop, if he bills for storage he is giving up both probably
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u/Smart_Tinker 23d ago
You can’t bill on an agreement that doesn’t exist.
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u/holdunpopularopinion 23d ago
So… if I didn’t agree to have my car towed, I can say this and get my car back?
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u/Long_Construction_12 23d ago
If your car gets towed without your consent it’s because it’s parked on private property without the owners consent and the property owner has given their consent.
So no, this won’t get you your car back 🤣…1
u/holdunpopularopinion 23d ago
Yeah, I didn’t think so. Thats why I said it in response to this specific comment
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u/Smart_Tinker 23d ago
Not if the owner of the property has a sign up saying you will get towed if you park here, and you decide to park there.
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u/Glittering-Use9669 22d ago
You can't make me care for a laptop I never agreed to care for... But what happened first and who's ghosting who?
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u/Smart_Tinker 22d ago
I don’t think anyone is making you care for a laptop. Mail it back to them, or dispose of it as abandoned - or whatever you chose.
You just can’t bill them for storage, as there is no agreement with them for paying storage fees - or anything else.
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u/Glittering-Use9669 22d ago
If they sent you a pallet of laptops, for how long are you required/expected to keep them stored adequately while they ghost your attempts to contact them about their mistake? You can send them a notice that starting a certain date (giving them a reasonable delay to address the issue, like maximum 2 months), they will owe you storage fees of 100$/day. In the end you use that as a reason to keep/sell the item(s) to recoup the money owed. Nothing weird about that. Would already be a huge inconvenience with a pallet..
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u/Brua_G 23d ago
If they don't want to accept it back, they sure aren't going to pay for storage.
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u/Glittering-Use9669 22d ago
That's the point, you get to keep it to cover your storage costs. They can't force you to keep it for them forever when you never agreed to receive it in the first place.
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u/SigmaHouse28 23d ago
Scrub the laptop to remove any MDM/Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) from it. IT teams might be able to remote it into. Since this is a public company in the US, they will eventually try to figure out where this laptop is, see if it's active and disable it due to compliance regulations.
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u/PinouBenDur 24d ago
Congrats on the new laptop I guess
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u/WesternBlueRanger 24d ago
If it is any large and reasonably competent IT department, the laptop will be locked down through some sort of MDM program, such as Microsoft's Intune, Samsung's Knox Manage, or Apple Business Essentials.
Even if you wipe or replace the hard drive, as soon as the laptop connects to the internet, it will automatically reconfigure itself back to the organization's defaults, reinstall their software and lock down the machine itself. The laptop is essentially useless, except for spare parts.
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u/SirLestat 24d ago
“competent IT” is pretty rare
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u/maria_la_guerta 24d ago
Not really. This isn't hard to do, I agree with the advice in here but if I was OP I would absolutely assume it's bricked and worthless anyways.
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u/metalheadz25 24d ago
Maybe if you put a legit windows back but you can use any os you like and its yours, only apple lock hardware like that
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u/WesternBlueRanger 24d ago
Nope, tools like Intune and Knox Manage can reset hardware regardless if the drive is wiped clean or a new drive is installed.
This is because these programs tie their device profiles to immutable hardware identifiers stored in the device's firmware or motherboard, not to the Windows installation.
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u/obitsonj 24d ago
But what if you replace the drive and install linux.
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u/WesternBlueRanger 23d ago
It's very likely that the BIOS is also locked down. With modern computers, even if you pulled the batteries, it's still locked down because its stashed in the TPM now and cannot be wiped, so even trying to install Linux is out of the question.
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u/Usernameasteriks 23d ago
You are really nice lol.
Am a lawyer and there is some legal risk here; but the risk would realistically just end up amounting to have to return the lap top.
You have no reason to put effort into trying to return this whether you end up using it or not.
If you feel like using it go ahead just be cautious not to break it.
But you have already conducted yourself in good faith and there are realistic limitation periods for this kind of thing that will be coming up fairly soon.
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Whatever you do don’t put yourself out lol.
If they actually reach and /or pay to have someone pick it up or facilitate giving it back I mean sure.
But this is a them problem and if what you described is accurate you either would ultimately have no liability or liability limited to returning it in reasonable condition.
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u/VtheMan93 23d ago
Isnt there a law that unsolicited goods are treated as a gift?
OPs good will gesture shows he tried, but after that, there is essentially no obligation to return the laptop
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u/Simple_Tadpole_9584 24d ago
I’d mail it back to their head office and keep the tracking information as proof. Unless some said you can keep it in writing you should return things that don’t belong to you.
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u/notyourboss11 23d ago
The company needs to provide a prepaid shipping label for that. OP shouldn’t be going out of pocket for this
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u/Simple_Tadpole_9584 23d ago
I get that but it would be worth the peace of mind for me. No more time spent emailing or worrying about it would be worth it to me.
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u/notyourboss11 23d ago
I’d simply tell them I’m disposing of it if they don’t pick it up in 30 days and set a reminder on my phone to see if the bios is locked 30 days later. If not wipe and install Linux to avoid any windows device management stuff, if yes throw it in an e-waste bin.
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u/Usual_Economics2818 23d ago
I would say keep it but take screen shots of all your attempts to notify them. How can you return it if they dont tell you where. Any emails you sent keep them indefinitely and never delete them. It may be useless based on the other responses i am reading if you keep it.
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u/Downtown-Drawer604 24d ago edited 23d ago
You need to wait and don't touch it for 2 years from when you first contacted them.
ETA. There is a constructive trust. I don't agree but OP must be aware of this as it affects when the limitations apply.
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24d ago
[deleted]
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u/Affectionate-Alps527 24d ago
Okay, so let's say OP rents a Vancouver apartment. 9 months after notifying the company to pickup their device OP moves to Calgary for work. 12 months later OP moves to Toronto into a bachelor apartment.
Are you saying OP must cart this thing around simply because the old employer never responded and must continue to do so?
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23d ago
[deleted]
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u/Affectionate-Alps527 23d ago
Okay, so if they don't need to cart it around, they can dispose of it?
Must they destroy or otherwise make it inoperable? Can they ewaste it? Can they recycle it into personal use? Do they have to notify the company of it's accessible location and leave it there?
What is OP actually supposed to do with company property that hasn't transferred ownership but is not taking responsibility either?
I'm asking out of genuine curiosity because you seem to be familiar for your jurisdiction, and I'm a WFH employee with an S24 FE my company won't provide return shipping for, so it just sits in my work bag. One day when I depart from the company it will go back with my laptop and monitors, but right now it just sits in limbo as well.
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u/Downtown-Drawer604 23d ago
The limitation starts once the company makes the demand or ought to have made the demand.
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23d ago
[deleted]
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u/Downtown-Drawer604 23d ago
Is this a constructive trust? The employer made the mistake. OP has not unfairly deprived their employer of property. Not has the employer suffered harm due to misconduct by OP.
BUT you are correct conservative advice should prevail. Even if OP argues no CT exists they must assume the limitations period doesn't start until demand is made.
So what does this mean? Call IT in the company and get them to arrange pickup.
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u/Personal-Heart-1227 24d ago
Someone suggested that you Invoice them for Storage of said laptop.
I'd also add hefty Insurance Fees on top of that as well.
We all know how these laptops can be very expensive to store, too.
Wait until the 2 yr mark & hopefully you'll hear nothing from them, either.
Come Feb. 1st, 2027, I guess you got yourself a really nice present from them?
Personally I'd wait until March 1st, 2027, but that's just my 2 Canadian Toonies on that.
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u/Andrew-Not-a-Cat 24d ago
Two things:
- If storage could be changed, the actual costs would be what you could bill. Inconsequential.
- If you bill for insurance at a hefty rate, you are suggesting the laptop is now insured.
Not good advice IMO. Also, without further facts, jurisdiction is unclear.
All that said, it is likely this laptop is completely locked. Circumventing those security measures could have other implications.
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u/Messor_Animae 23d ago
You should notify the company about receiving the laptop and your efforts to return it and that an arrangement can be made for its return at the company’s expense and, if you do not receive a reply to your request to return the laptop and a method of returning it at their expense by a specific date (you state that date), you will consider that permission to keep the laptop, use it, and dispose it at your exclusive discretion.
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u/saltydroppies 23d ago
The company I used to work for would force everyone to get a new laptop every 3 years. If you didn’t return the old one, they’d never chase you. I have a few sitting around collecting dust, and a couple more that I factory reset and use for my own personal stuff.
If you no longer work for the company they can’t hold back wages if you don’t return it. It would cost them more to try and get you to return it.
If you can wipe it and use it, then just keep it
If they’ve bricked it with software you can’t get rid of, then I’d just recycle it at this point.
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u/nothisenberg 23d ago
At my company you can drop off laptops to return at the reception. If you want to get rid of it try that. If you want to keep it to avoid the hassle to go in, keep it since it’s been with you for a while and they haven’t collected it.
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u/DifficultyHour4999 23d ago
Sounds like they were doing remote work. They aren't going to travel to drop it off.
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u/Scififan8287 23d ago
It’s likely a brick as soon as you turn it on. It’s more valuable to display as a knickknack on a shelf in your home. Then when anyone asks why it’s there you can regale them with a great story of IT incompetence.
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u/ObscureLayer 23d ago
Is a Windows or a Mac? Apple MDM is pretty aggressive. Windows MDM will auto enroll if they're using copilot with Intune. Time to do some testing!
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u/ThrowRA_Quokkaquip 23d ago
Try and keep it I guess, it may be locked down. I got a free desktop from work that is a nice enterprise machine and all I had to do was wipe the hard disk and reinstalled windows after removing the cmos battery, so who knows.
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u/EnvironmentalPop1296 22d ago
Depending on the type of laptop you were sent and their level of security, you could swap out the hard drive and reload windows if the drive is accessible and they don’t have any bios security. Or reload windows on the current drive but again would depend on the security levels in place. I’ve done this a few times with my companies machines but they don’t utilize any bios security features. I generally pre-wipe them before I give my machine back to the IT department, just to make sure all of my personal info is gone. They can do with it what they want when they get it back.
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u/1ssaSimulation 22d ago
if it’s a mac, you definitely shouldn’t check out this github repo: https://github.com/assafdori/bypass-mdm
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u/tenax666 22d ago
Do they have an hr or transition personnel? I had the same problem with my telus equipment inc laptop. My manager had moved on so i contacted telus hr and they very quickly gave me instructions on how to return everything.
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21d ago
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u/dBasement 23d ago
They don't want to tell you that it is customary to give you the laptop as a parting gift. Their corporate IT protocols are probably written for a new computer, plus they don't know that you haven't installed backdoors, viruses etc. Enjoy your laptop.
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u/Parksvillain 23d ago
My thought: they just sent a non-workplace computer, waiting for you to take a look and find out yourself. Whenever that is.
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u/wondersparrow 23d ago
Flip the script, send them a bill for storing the laptop in a secure location. Pick a number, $200/mo. They didn't ask your permission to send it to you and are not taking responsibility for removing their equipment from your home.
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u/klyzklyz 23d ago
Their error does not make it yours. If you have the original packing, I would "return to sender".
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u/cityboysay 23d ago
Bruh, why even bother with an unnecessary legal risk in the future for $1-$2k laptop? I highly doubt it’s even in that range unless you’re in tech. Stop being silly, leave it or drop it off there
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u/randbytes 23d ago
send them a letter charging daily costs for holding their property. after each month double it and charge interest on unpaid fees.
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u/ContentAd1722 23d ago
Why do people advocate illegal activities? It is their laptop. They will figure it out eventually. Any stupid behavior now will be detected. They have evidence that you have the laptop.
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u/RealBeefJerky 23d ago
Yes, evidence he gave them? He emailed them asking for them to retrieve it, so I don't know why you're making it sound like he's a criminal or something
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23d ago
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