Pirate Electrician Supplied Power To 1,500 Homes

fridaynightsmoke writes "A former electrical engineer for utility EDF has been prosecuted for illegally supplying power to some 1,500 homes in north London. Derek Brown, 45, was arrested in 2008 after being seen tampering with the electric grid in a manhole. He specialized in connecting separate supplies to houses that were split into apartments. One landlord involved, Haresh Parmar, was jailed for 9 months for stealing £30,000 worth of electricity for 22 of his apartments. Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."

Comments

British Power Supply

[Cylix]

Can someone explain how the mains circuit is supplied.

TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing. Here an inspector literally reads the meter or in some cases a digital meter supplies information automatically. In fact, my gas is apparently wireless and merely requires someone to drive by to meter the usage. It would seem like something that would be very difficult to subvert in a suburban environment.

Re:British Power Supply

[mysidia]

TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing.

We're reading about it, and the article wasn't written by the person, so obviously someone noticed (even though they were apparently slow about it... perhaps they wanted to let the charges rack up, so they could make an example of the person)

Re:British Power Supply

[davester666]

Um, he can do all kinds of things.

Just tap into power and run it to a new building. Meter reader isn't expecting to go to the building to read the meter, so nothing is missed.

Or run electricity into building, through a box that looks like a meter, only gives out a faulty reading.

As for wireless and/or internet-connected meters, it wouldn't surprise me if the company isn't particularly on the clue train and may not, say, have a very good system in place for authenticating the data from the device [so you could replicate the signal and put out whatever reading you want]. However, the company probably does require a semi-regular physical meter reading, to check that the physical meter has the same reading as the broadcast one, and the system doesn't appear to be tampered with].

Electricity may be more complicated to wire up correctly to bypass the meter [so x% goes through the meter and y% goes around the meter], but gas and water are really straightforward to do the plumbing and to get a reasonable percentage through the meter, and people have been really imaginative in disguising/hiding the modifications.

Re:British Power Supply

[Qubit]

if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction. People have been prosecuted in the UK for doing this.

How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?

I mean, sure, you could prosecute them for trespass or something if you move your stuff onto their property/airspace, but if it's all on your own land, it's just EM waves flowing through the air. If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?

Anyhow, I figure you might be trollin' seeing as how you'd have to get really close to get any measurable power via induction, but it is an interesting question in any case...

Re:British Power Supply

[Chrisq]

Or run electricity into building, through a box that looks like a meter, only gives out a faulty reading.

The article talks about buildings that are split into apartments. In the UK sometimes the landlord pays the electric company, and then has private meters for each apartment - all going through the main meter. (This is much less common than it was because there are strict limits on markup and additional charges. Most new flats now have electric company meters). The safest way to fiddle the bill would be to have one or two flats going through the main meter and the rest using an illegal collection. The landlord of course collects money from all the tenants!

Re:British Power Supply

[MichaelSmith]

cleverly designed arms

Pantographs.

Yeah thats the word but now I am thinking in terms of jumper cables with hooks on the end and a snare built out of 40mm pipe with a cable running along the inside. If you can bang in your own ground you might just need to snare the active. Design it for a fast charge. Could be the breakthrough that electric vehicles have been waiting for!

Re:British Power Supply

[Anonymous Coward]

You can even see this in judgements we would now disagree with.

The famous "end of slavery" judgement in England is very narrowly written, it holds that slavery is a repugnant institution, and so could only exist in England if it was the law, then it says the law doesn't provide for slavery in England, and so the plaintiff, who is in England, is not a slave and may go free.

But it carefully says nothing about slavery outside England. There were in practice essentially no slaves in England, which is why this chap (brought there from a colony and unwilling to return) was chosen as a test case. Everything was paid for by anti-slavery advocates. So the intention was to secure a judgement that slavery as a whole was illegal, and the judge did not do that. He didn't want to cause chaos by spontaneously freeing huge numbers of slaves.

Campaigners still called this an end to slavery, but England continued to operate slave ships, and to control colonies whose commercial viability depended on slavery. The only thing that had changed was a man who found himself in England could be sure he wasn't a slave - though as a servant he might be little better off. It would take many more years before English rulers instructed their colonies to cease buying new slaves and grant their existing slaves freedom.

Re:British Power Supply

[zippthorne]

Conversely, the power company ought to control their emissions. If they're leaking enough power onto a person's property to be usefully collected, they should compensate the property owner for the EM pollution.

Bad puns aside...

[xenobyte]

If people were willing to use this scheme to get cheaper electricity, I guess the electricity is too expensive.

Here in Denmark over 90% of the amount we pay for electricity is various taxes. No wonder people turn to alternative solutions because once you've done yours and switched bulbs, appliances and everything to the most environmentally friendly versions available, you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)

Harry Tuttle?

[forkazoo]

Tuttle, or was it Buttle? Anyhow, clearly a rogue handyman on the loose. Better arrest somebody.

Re:genius!

[MichaelSmith]

No, during the day you drive it around. Then stop where you can steal power during the night.

Re:Oh my--

[ommerson]

Or more likely, a small number of crooked customers who have a vested interest in keeping the whole thing quiet. Note that the a landlord of 22 properties got a longer sentence than the electrician.

Re:Libertard wank

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't that the 'corportate behemoths' are under-regulated. The problem is that any competition from smaller businesses are over-regulated. The government gets to pass laws and gets seen as 'doing something', while the big guys eat the cost of that regulation and make it up with all the additional business they squeeze out from the competition. Even worse, companies like GE and BP get to look at heroes for pushing legislation for things that sound good like 'Green Energy' while doing so simply to benefit themselves and harm the competition.

If government was smaller, and not as easily bought (as as wise man said, "When bying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators"), you wouldn't have this incestuous relationship. It's a form of rent seeking, and you wouldn't have it as bad if the upper eschelon of both govt. and business weren't tag-teaming to screw the little guys.

Re:Libertarian fantasy wank.

[KillAllNazis]

What version of money would this be that you cannot buy power with?

Re:Libertarian fantasy wank.

[Archangel Michael]

You obviously are more inclined to want more regulation until every facet of your life if regimented, say like China or North Korea.

No, there is no flaw in your slippery slope argument /sarcasm.

The only thing you fail to mention is that the "libertarian" examples you provided aren't libertarian at all. They are anarchistic. And if that is your view of LIBERTY than you shouldn't comment on ideals you have no concept of.

The function of government is to secure the liberties of the people. Most of the third world countries that are often touted by the leftwing anti liberty crowd (such as yourself), is that they DO NOT HAVE a functioning governance.

And while you're at it, why not admit that corporations are nothing more than collectives, like unions? When you realize that collectivization of politics leads to tyranny, then you'll be able to realize that you've been an idiot, and the end of your leftwing fantasy wank.

I'm not against "unions" or "corporations", I'm just against collectives of any sort infringing upon the liberties of anyone, even if I'm affected directly. Because even if I'm not personally affected by anti libertarian tyrants, I will be, eventually.

Re:Libertarian fantasy wank.

[ncc74656]

What version of money would this be that you cannot buy power with?

If there's no significant accumulation of power in the government to begin with, all the money in the world will do you no good here. You can't buy that which doesn't exist.

Taxes: not magic, but not obvious, either

[fyngyrz]

You mean, like when you get your W2 and fill out that pesky 1040? Yeah, I already know what I pay in taxes.

If that's how you figure it, you're not even close.

For instance, if you pay $100 for plumbing, but the plumber has to give $30 of that to the feds for his taxes, do you think the plumber is going to do $100 worth of work for you? No. He's only getting $70, and so that is the very MOST he going to do for you -- he'll do less, in fact, because otherwise he will not make a profit.

So, if you pay 30% taxes, then you had to earn $142.85 to pay the plumber $100, for which you got less than $70 worth of services. In the end, $142 of your dollars bought something less than $70 worth of services.

People are generally unaware of this, because we don't see the plumber's taxes; that info is hidden. Each purchase we make of goods and service has a significant, but variable, hidden siphon of funds going on to the government, directly affecting how much actual work your money does for us.

Sometimes they even manage to tax our purchases more than once; for instance, a death tax taxes funds and goods we already bought when we try to pass them on, making them that much more expensive, or, to look at it another way, devaluing your money even further.

So... perhaps you do know what taxes are doing to you. But most people really don't. It's because it isn't all that obvious. What some tax reformers want is that it be made obvious, generally by consolidating the process (taxation) into one event - for instance, a national sales tax that would replace the other taxes, or other, similarly transparent ideas. The trick to it all is making it fair, and determining what "fair" means in the context of people who are barely making it as compared to those at the other end to whom taxes are irrelevant to them making it, and all those in between, for whom taxes variously affect their lives.