Confessions Of a Cable Thief

Cable World, Oct 6, 2003

Byline: ANTHONY CRUPI

For someone who looks to be sitting on over $5,000 in stolen stereo equipment, the short kid in the Michael Vick replica jersey is remarkably relaxed. Maybe it's his proximity to all the other ripped-off merchandise on Canal Street - an exhaust-choked downtown thoroughfare that pretty much functions as Manhattan's large intestine, as far as the stolen goods trade goes - or maybe all the heat is bearing down on the old guys shilling Prada knockoffs up the street, but either way, the kid leaning up against the van is cool.

The same can't be said for his vehicle, a creepy brown van destined to be tossed for DNA evidence before making its last trip to the auto graveyard. But if you're of a certain mind-set, the stuff inside the van more than makes up for its aesthetic shortcomings. Both the rear doors are thrown open, and in the pixelated murk of dusk I can just make out the brand names of some of the components he's got stacked up in the back. Yamaha. Sanyo. Kenwood.

When I ask to take a look at a CD player with a six-disc capacity, Mini Vick makes a face like he's recalling a foul odor. "I can't be opening every box up in here," he grouses, which works as a better sales pitch than you might imagine. Speed is of the essence here. There's really no time to sniff at the merchandise or haggle over the price. As a crowd of consumer electronics enthusiasts begins to form on the periphery of the Crimemobile, I clear my throat and ask for what I really came for.

"You got anything in there that will get me free cable?"

Five minutes later I'm $20 lighter. I've got a standard-sized padded mailer stuffed into my messenger bag, though I opted to leave the CD player behind. No need to compound the felony.

That said, I'm already pretty sure that I've been ripped off. Without going into too much compromising detail, on the few occasions in the (far distant) past where I have been a party to, uh, signal reallocation, there was always some kind of set-top-type device involved. Something rectangular and substantial, with an LED readout on the front and a port or two in the back. What I have in my possession right now seems a little on the slight side.

My suspicions are confirmed on the 6 train. When I tear open the package, I find two cylindrical metal objects with threaded endpoints and the legend "CT-HPF" stamped on each. HPF is merely an acronym for "high pass filter," a device that reduces signals received from transmitters operating below 30 MHz. Your cost at Radio Shack: $3.95.

Damn you, Mini Vick.

Of course, it's hard to get self-righteous about being thwarted in an attempt to break the law. My getting burned on a cheap piece of hardware is nothing compared to the fleecing the cable industry's been taking since the days of the Jerrold box. A comprehensive survey conducted by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association in 2000 concluded that revenue lost to cable operators as a direct result of signal theft were in excess of $6.5 billion a year, or about 17% of the industry's estimated gross. Small potatoes it ain't.

Once those figures started making the rounds, cable's biggest challenge, other than stopping signal theft outright, was to convince the general populace that there was, in fact, something fundamentally wrong about stealing the service.

Trouble is, there seem to be an awful lot of people out there who disagree with that assessment. A Massachusetts-based cable filcher interviewed in Cable World last year argued that recent news about the accounting practices of his service provider (Adelphia) justified ripping off the signal.

"The way I see it, I'm just thieving from the thieves," he said. "When they clean up their act, maybe I'll clean up mine."

That may be a weird inversion of the Golden Rule, but this kind of moral opportunism isn't limited to Adelphia's service footprint. Google the phrase "free cable," and you'll find yourself staring down the barrel of 263,000 hits. The more specific query for "cable descrambler" yields 81,100 hits. We're a nation of thieves.

Much of the casual attitude toward cable theft can be traced to two co-related factors. Firstly, there are a lot of people out there who really have a strong aversion toward their local cable provider. After years of being jerked around on installation and service calls ("We can get there three Mondays from now, between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m."), customers began to view the cable company with the same enmity once reserved for the federal government. "Once satellite got their foot in the door, people got a lot more grouchy," says Carey Turner, a former Adelphia field technician. "Now that cable's monopoly is busted up, across the board you're seeing a greater effort to serve the customer more quickly and more effectively."

Secondly, it's rather hard to turn up what is in effect a free lunch. In his experience, Turner guesses that most cable theft is passive. In areas where there are high seasonal turnover rates - resorts, university towns - the tap to a previous tenant's home may often never be shut off. Thus, when the new tenants move in, they find that they have inherited cable. "You have to go out to the site and physically turn the tap off," Turner explains. "For whatever reason, that doesn't happen as often as it should."