My 2 cents - I was cable theft investigator in the heyday of
descramblers.
Basically was like shooting fish in a barrel - trap the premium
channels and trigger a trouble call. See the box and have company send
a lawyer letter.
Company was more interested in civil penalties and word of mouth than
sending people to jail or any other scare tactics. The distributors
though were arrested - got a few of them too, sometimes by getting
one of the above canaries to sing.
Fun times.
On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 09:29:07 -0700 (PDT),
thomastownsley68@gmail.com
wrote:
To try and shed some light on this I will put my 2 cents in. When the companies around us were using scientific atlanta 8600 boxes, I did redo them to get all channels, pay/view, etc. I can talk about it now because the statutes would HAVE to have ran
out. With those boxes you could buy them yourself and alter it how you want but you were to tell the cable company. I always kept a written letter in sight on my tv in the envelope and stamped to the cable company saying what I was doing. I would just
let it sit there though in case anything came up. It didn't . If I remember right I had to order chips from a different state. For those boxes you had to jump the sound with a 1 inch piece of paper clip or safety pin (easiest and best things to use)
soldered 1 inch behind the number 3 button. I always made sure to warn people to not call when a channel they were not suppossed to have is temporarily down.
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