An Irish Sting Operation

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Cable TV fiddlers ensnared by Garda's World Cup trap


Alan Murdoch in Dublin


HUNDREDS of fraudsters in Cork have been nabbed in an ingenious "sting"
targeting three human weaknesses: greed, cable television, and the World
Cup.
For two years Cork Communications, a cable television supplier to 30,000
homes, has been plagued by revenue-sapping fiddles. Former subscribers were
getting their "black box" cable decoders tampered with to let them watch
pay-only channels such as Sky Sport and the Movie Channel for free.
An illicit black-box black market appeared, supplied by a wave of house
burglaries. "Hot" decoders were sold at an average Ir#60 a time. The result
was 4,500 miscreants watching on the cheap, defrauding the firm of an
annual Ir#750,000.
The solution had echoes of an FBI sting in the mid Eighties when dozens of
US crooks were lured with congratulations on winning a non-existent
competition, only to be arrested on arriving to collect their "winnings".
The solution devised by Cork    Communications blended hi-tech ingenuity
with an unerring sense of the one passion guaranteed to unite criminal
classes this summer.
A continuous message was broadcast on a cable channel which could be
received only by decoders on which the scrambler system had been illegally
by-passed. "To mark Ireland's first ever May Day bank holiday, YFBT
Promotions is offering an Irish World Cup T-shirt absolutely free," if
promised, giving a freephone number.
Some 2,000 replies were taped. Weeding out those who heard about the offer
in the pub, local gardai focused on former subscribers among the earliest
callers. Last Monday Cork District Court granted 416 search warrants.
The next 48 hours saw a blitz of raids such as J Edgar Hoover would have
relished. An initial 150 people face charges and possible fines or
imprisonment. A Garda spokesman said. "I hope this will prove a deterrent.
We've scared a lot of people."
Incidentally, three letters of the name YFBT Promotions stand for "Your Box
is Tampered".




Dept. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk   PHONE = +44 91 222 7923
FAX = +44 91 222 8232