Cable Box Piracy Ring Busted

WC as Kato writes "The U.S. Attorney's Office said it has busted a huge cable piracy ring. They made over $10 million in 5 years by advertising on the Internet and in magazines. Their only cover to the illegality of their actions was a disclaimer that the boxes were not illegal to own. Police say customers who purchased them are now at risk of being arrested. Did any customer actually fall for their 'legal disclaimer?'"

Comments

Dear DirecTV

[mikeswi]

Dear DirecTV,

Please take note. This is how you deal with people pirating your signals without being viewed as jackbooted thugs. You find people buying and selling equipment designed specifically to do that.

Contrast this to your current methods which involve extorting protection money out of people who do NOT pirate your signals simply because they bought a programmable smart card with a wide range of possible uses, one of which *might* lead to the pirating of your signals.

I have to say...

[Zog The Undeniable]

On a scale of major crimes, this one is seen by Joe Schmoe in the same serious vein as crossing at a "Don't Walk" light. Apparently a contributory factor to the collapse of ITV Digital in the UK was that hundreds of thousands of Scots were using pirate viewing cards, sold openly on Glasgow and Edinburgh street markets, and not paying a penny to ITV. There's a huge appetite out there for "free" TV as subscription TV is seen as overpriced - considering you get even more adverts than on free-to-air TV.

Significant that it was Fox who carried the article though - they have something to lose ;-)

$70 a month to watch advertisements??

[nich37ways]

Gwenice Garnett was happy to hear about the bust as she stopped by Comcast this evening to upgrade to digital cable.

She's paying 70-bucks a month.

Garnette says, "I pay a substantial amount of money for my cable and if I have to pay, they should have to pay!"

Living in Australia digital tv and all the joys of interactive tv and movies on demand is still to be rolled out AFAIK anyway, I believe it is due sometime next year

However I find it hard to believe that people are so willing to pay so much to watch advertisements and it will surely get worse in the future.

*put on tinfoil hat*

Digital tv means providers can finally start to monitor who is watching what and when, this means they get to build up massive databases of viewing patterns. Combine this with an increased level of profiling and we get targeted advertising. The great joy of been told what we want according to what we watch and whatever random data the advertising companies have bought.

If anyone out there has digital tv, they are monitoring you, they will use the data to directly advertise to you and to take as much of your money as possible.

*takeoff tinfoil hat*

Anyone who believes this will not happen is at best naive and worst extremely foolish. I know it will not happen in the next year, but the ground work is been laid now and I see no sensible way to avoid it unless people refuse to watch digital tv, an unlikely proposition or it is legislated by the government (an unlikely thing)

Anyone with any ideas on how to try and escape the future of advertising hell..

"Legal disclaimer"

[Zocalo]

Did any customer actually fall for their 'legal disclaimer?'. Sure they did; the same demographic of people that receives a "confidential email" from a Mr. Mobutu of Nigeria and parts with large sums of cash. However, it's far more likely that the majority of customers probably saw that and thought "yeah, right!", followed quickly by the thoughts "cheap cable!" and "where's my credit card?"

That's a poor argument at best - here's why...

[WIAKywbfatw]

(OK, I going to get flamed to hell and back for posting this, but here goes nothing.)

This "if your signals penetrate my airwaves then they belong to me and I can do whatever I like with them" argument really is flawed.

Yes, if you were an island state that would hold true, but you're not, you're an American citizen (or the citizen of another country) and you're bound by the rules and laws of the country that you live in.

Now, if you live in the US, you have to play by the US government's rules. One of the rules says that killing someone is forbidden, and that if you kill someone then that's a crime and you have to pay for your crime.

Another one of the rules says that certain wavelengths of the RF spectrum belong to (or are for the exclusive use of) certain governmental organisations (eg, the US armed forces, police departments) or private corporations (eg, DirecTV). In the former case, these wavelengths are used without compensation, but in the latter case, the corporations concerned are paying for the right to exclusive use of those frequencies.

Just who are they paying? Well, directly, they are paying your government, and hence, indirectly, they are paying you/i>. So, although they might not be sending you personally a cheque (check) in the post, you are being paid for the use of those airwaves.

Now, if you disagree with this arangement, if you don't like any third party owning then the solution is simple: Lobby your Congressman and/or other representatives.

But, please, don't pretend that DirecTV or whoever has no right to be upset when you decode their signals without paying for their service. They have every right, and that right was sold to them by your government.

Obviously, this arrangement of rights between the individual, the government and the corporation will vary from country to country. (For example, if you're Canadian, then intercepting signals intended for the US market and doing with them whatever you want is legal, as determined by the Canadian legal system.)

But pretending that the law of the land can be ignored and that "if you beam signals directly toward me, you don't get to complain when I use them", and "you are not allowed to take away basic rights of perception in order to save a few bucks", are poor arguments that fail to take into account that the rights here (as determined by law) are with the transmitter and not the receiver.

Now feel free to retort. Just keep the personal insults out of it please?

Re:DMCA,,,?

[dissy]

Before the DMCA, technically they were right, these boxes _are_ legal to own.
Now, its very illegal to _USE_ them... But to just own one, that was not.

Now granted, who in their right mind would spend money on one just to own and not use, I couldnt tell ya. But as far as the disclaimer goes, they only mentioned owning, not using, so it was technically acurate and truthful.

But you are no doubt right. DMCA makes any trafficing in them illegal now, including buying one.

I'm shocked these two people kept records around at all.
Saving finantual documents for 7 years is only for ligit businesses after all ;)

no different than a cable modem...

[John Seminal]

don't the cable companies have a rental charge for those boxes? if you order service and pay for it, don't they charge you for each additional descrambler you have to rent. how is owning your descrambler any different from buying a cable modem. you still pay for the service, but instead of renting the equipment, you own it. why should anyone be forced to rent the box? this sounds to me like they are shifting the burden from proving you are doing something illegal like stealing cable, to saying we know you have the box, now prove you are innocent.

also, for the money you spend, why can't you buy individual chanels from the cable company. why do you have to buy them in a package? what if all i want to buy from them is just cspan and cnn? why cant i buy just those two chanels? what do i also have to get a package? because they are a monopoly and the only other option is a dish, and if you live in a condo or apartment and do not face south, you are screwed.

Re:Stainless Steel Rat

[Motherfucking Shit]

It is the same thing here - the folks who are smart enough to walk away before things go south are never caught - thus we never really hear about them in the news. The only ones we hear about are the stupid ones who cash the last check and get busted.

Ponderous, man, ponderous.

This reminds me of something I saw on 20/20 or 48 Hours a couple of weeks ago. A pair of guys came up with an ingenious scam: their local horse racing track posted unclaimed winning ticket numbers on its website. Apparently, winning tickets could be fed into a machine at the track which would verify things via some OCR magic, then spit out cash money. These two guys got the bright idea to print up fake unclaimed "winning tickets" with the right font, etc. to fool the cash machines.

Everything was going just fine. They were pulling the scam and cashing out to the tune of thousands of dollars a month - as one of them said in the interview, it was "unclaimed money," it's not like they were sticking up banks. At this pace, they never would have been caught; a few grand a month was way under the radar of the gaming commission. Then, one of the fools got greedy and decided to print up a forged ticket for a practically impossible series of bets, which paid off in the millions. People got suspicious damn quick. Now they're both in jail.

It's definitely true, greed will ruin just about any successful scam. If these two guys had just kept running their few-$K/month scam, I bet they'd still be out there living the good life.