|
Digital Cable Box
There are
many ways for a pirate to get caught. Since stealing cable is
illegal in the U.S., you can
be fined and sent to jail for theft of service. Cable companies
claim to lose millions of dollars in revenue every year because
of pirates, so they are serious in their pursuit of ridding
them from their system.
A pirate
will often show-off the fact they can get every channel to their
friends. Pretty soon lots of people know about it, and then
the cable company offers a "Turn In A Pirate and Get $50"
program. A "friend" needs the money and turns the
Pirate in.
A pirate
or more likely, unsuspecting housemate of a pirate who knows
nothing about what's going on calls the cable company to report
a problem with the equipment or signal. The cable company makes
a service call and finds gray-market equipment connected to
the cable.
During a
pay-per-view event such as a fight, the cable company offers
a free T-shirt to all viewers. Little does the "Pirates"
know that just before that message appeared on the screen, legitimate
viewer's boxes were told to switch to another channel while
still displaying the original channel number.
So now the
legitimate subscriber continues to see the "original"
signal, without the T-shirt offer, while the pirate gets an
800 number plastered on the screen. The pirate calls, and the
cable company gets a list of all potential pirates...
The cable
company temporarily broadcasts some soft-core pornography onto
what is supposed to be The Disney Channel (and vice-versa).
They simultaneously reprogram subscriber converters to re-map
the channels correctly, so the change is transparent to all
but non-company converters. Those who call to complain about
the "non-Disney" entertainment (or cartoons on the
Playboy channel) are more than likely to have gray-market decoders
or digital cable box.
Go
to page 10
Start
at beginning of report
|
