What are the odds of recovering your laptop, without and with a tool like this installed? The statistics could very well be something on the order of 2% and 2.003% (I made that up). Without a much larger sample size than these anecdotes can provide it is impossible to make an informed decision.

Given that Prey is free, open source, and has been around for quite a while, I think that it's fairly unlikely that this is a hoax.

when prey first started they also posted a link to their service on hn as well and if you donated anything to them they gave you a lifetime premium subscription.

prey is pretty damn helpful, and i install it on everything i've got.

btw i dont work for them, and i've never seen them advertise anywhere, but this would be good advertisement...