In those cases, Seymour explains that people would sometimes climb the telephone poles, find their line and reconnect it - but that’s not quite as easy as it sounds. If you didn’t pay your cable bill at all, then the cable company would come by and literally disconnect your cable at the pedestal or the box at the top of the telephone pole. So one filter would allow for just basic cable, but if you paid the cable company for HBO, they’d come by and put on a different filter that allowed that channel in. Instead, every channel was being sent to everyone, and then the cable company would put on “filters” that allowed certain channels to come through. What exactly they were doing is somewhat on the technical side, but basically, back in the days of analog, the cable company didn’t send individual signals to individual homes like they do now.
“I’ve got miles of video tape somewhere of people doing just that,” he says. “It’s hard to say exactly, but I’d say cable theft began almost from the start of cable TV,” Seymour says, explaining that, “people would do stupid things like plugging a cable into a pedestal and running it across the lawn, through the side window and into their living rooms.” And while the ground-level height of the pedestals made things a little bit easier, Seymour says he’d also catch people climbing up telephone poles. “It was kind of like the wild west back in the analog days,” he says, recounting stories of stolen premium channels, corrupt cable guys and homeowners climbing up telephone poles. Among other clients, Seymour was hired by cable companies on the East Coast to catch those stealing cable, which occurred not just with descramblers, but in a wide variety of ways. “I had one guy get eight years,” says Dennis Seymour, a criminal justice professor who ran a private investigation firm back in the 1980s and 1990s.
BLACK BOX RADIO SCRAMBLER PLUS
I paid $27.53 plus $5.75 for shipping, and my eBay seller promised to get it in the mail right away - in the meantime, I did some sleuthing into the now-defunct world of cable theft, which was rampant during the days of analog.
And while the internet has long since replaced the need for such analog boob-viewers, no history of the devices would be complete without attempting to try one out for old time’s sake. Īlthough I never had a descrambler myself, I remember them fondly from the homes of a few privileged friends during my boyhood.
BLACK BOX RADIO SCRAMBLER PASSWORD
Before borrowing your buddy’s Netflix password was ever a thing, there was the cable descrambler: That magical black box that allowed for the clear, unscrambled, uninterrupted view of the most important thing in the world to me during my early adolescence: boobs.