Chipped boxes
 

There seems to be an alarming amount of chipped boxes being offered for sale around Mansfield this past few weeks, the price being £150 fitted. I just wondered if NTL are aware this is happening? I know a few people who have purchased these boxes, will charges be bought if these people are caught using these boxes? I've lost count how many times I've been offered one this past year.

Re: Chipped boxes
 

better be caught I say why can they get away with free tv when we all have to pay ?

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My sentiments exactly.

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Yes they are aware it goes on and have a dedicated team who have had considerable success in smashing the operations that market these.

They don't discuss their work publicly for obvious reasons, which is why people sometimes thing nothing is happening.

Like any crime, you can never totally eradicate it. But there's several people who've eaten bread and water for doing this.

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I was told with digital boxes NTL can change the signal on a frequent basis, so that a chipped box becomes scrambled and effectively useless after they do this. :confused:

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I'm sure ntl have all sorts of ways and means to reduce the effectiveness of chipped boxes. Perhaps the most obvious is that you have to be physically connected to ntl's cable system. I would have thought that chipping or otherwise that is bound to create some sort of signal into ntl's network that can be interrogated.

If your going to buy something that is chipped, surely a sky system would be a better option, as without the physical connection to a network, tracing the box must be much harder. All the chipped box would have to do is get round any changing scrambling codes.

Bottom line though using a chipped STB is theft, and cannot be condoned. Anyone caught using such a system deserves whatever they have coming to them.

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its not just the cable tv box's that are chipped but also the cable modem's as well stand alone that is.

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cant see the point in getting one tbh , i would rather pay the money / month than risk being banged up for theft of service :disturbd: :disturbd:

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This is not as common though as it is much harder to achieve...

and yes i agree the chippers should be caught :mad:

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£100 or less in belfast, i have the mobile number of one of the chippers , however no use giving this to ntl:

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why not ?????????????

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Why not? Go for it mate. As was said earlier, they have a team dedicated to cracking down on these idiots, so why not make use of it??

Browneggsandham :)

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Cant see them getting a court order to find out who the number belongs to! Come to think of it the sim may not even be registered! :(

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The SIM may not be registered if it's PAYG, but remember who owns most of the mobile transmitters in the UK... ;)

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Who?

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NTL apparently. But may be selling them on soon.

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I think you are referring to Television transmitters. AFAIK, the mobile phone operators actually use their own mobile antennas, and if Ofcom is to be believed, they do.

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OK, I did a seach on a local mast site that I know NTL owns. But the sitefinder only listed the operators using the site, MM02, T-Mobile and Hutchison and not the owner.

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OK, I stand corrected on that. However, the story does only say they are considering selling TV towers. I would be surprised if NTL started to sell Mobile phone masts though, there would seem to be quite some profit in running the sites..

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They did loose a high proportion of fraud ivestigators in the regions through cost cutting redundancies though, so perhaps they are not as efficient at catching people these days.

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Isn't it the sellers that have the new diet for this & not the end users?

I thought they got a tap on the wrist & offered an upgrade to a full package for 12 months that they actually pay for.

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Your point is?? How would NTL find out who had the mobile from just owning the transmitters? :confused:

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They wouldn't would they, theres very little technology involved in finding illegal boxes other than pinging them while an engineer works his way back through the network from the headend to the customers drop looking for the set-top transmitting.

Without a tip off, its like finding a needle in a haystack.

Their technology can only narrow it down to the last few hundred houses connected to the network at best, it cant even be narrowed down to paying customers because many disconnected ones still have drops connected in some areas.

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At best, I would have thought NTL would only be able to track the IMEI number or phone number. Neither of which would be tracable back to the user if the user hasn't registered.

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AFAIKR those that sell them tell thier customers thatthey should also keep up a basic suscription to guarantee a connection.
Connecting one without a sub is a big gamble as an installer is likely to remove you & reuse the link.

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Of course, all they really need to do is phone the guy and set up a 'sting' ... no high-tech tracing required. :)

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Just to make it clear, I was referring to the mobile phone of the seller being registered with the relevant network. Having said that, Chris T is right. They just need to employ someone to "buy" the chipped boxes.

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Or alternatively disconnect all non-subscribing houses from the cabs.

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That would work a treat, but somehow I think NTL would claim they don't have the manpower to do it.

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Surely they could make it a company policy that when a customer is disconnected they are removed from the cab. A clean up exercise could also be planned. With Ntls turn over they could eradicate the fraud in about a year!

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Surely they could. But surely they won't. :disturbd:

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They have very little control if contractors are doing the un-installs!

They used to leave the drop connected because the customer may of had their TV Aerial removed, or the un-installer just couldn't be bothered to plug it back in.

I seem to remember ntl (was CableTel then) removed aerials for customers the same time as they bought the analogue Sky satellite receiver from the customer as an incentive to get them to take service in the early days.
I think (perhaps I will be corrected) it is part of the licence to leave the customer with the analogue UHF channels to watch, if ntl removed the aerial this is difficult.

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Well they have control if they enforce the service level agreement they have with the contractor, but thats another thread.

I also think they are required to leave the cable for delivery of the analogue UHF channels (what will happen post switchover? Will they be required to send digital freeview in it's place?).

Now if NTL kept better control of its box stock, collecting those of cancelled customers, that would probably improve matters considerably.

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As well as reducing the supply to places such as ebay, it could also bring costs down as NTL would just need to test, then re-use the returned box.

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Probably not, as it would require an engineer to go to the house to disconnect it. ATM, I believe they just disable the box remotely.

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There is an initiative underway to recover those DSTBs out there that should have been collected when the subscriber disconnected. The Converter Recovery team are on 0800 052 6178, if you have (or know of) a DSTB that needs collecting.

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My service ends next month when I move house off-net. I'll certainly be giving these people a call. :tu:

I have no intention of posting the thing anywhere, even though it was recently posted in another thread on here that such an obligation exists within NTL's terms of use. No doubt some bean counter at head office thought that was a really clever condition to impose, pushing the financial cost of returning boxes onto the ex-subscriber rather than NTL footing it through techs' time wasted visiting houses just to pick up boxes. In the long run, however, all it has done is to provide a ready supply of unwanted boxes for the chippers to modify and sell on.

Hoist by their own petard, as they say.

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They don't usually send techs out (from what I've heard). It's more likely to be passed on to a specialist collection company, such as Wescott (not as an unpaid debt, just because they have collection agents anyway).

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I'm not sure what will happen after the big switch off, presumably they will still have to provide the UHF feed for customers to connect their Freeview box.

I do remember instances where ntl paid for disconncting disgruntled customers to have an aerial fitted by contractors, I think it was in a few cases in my old area when the customer said get your box and your cable out of my house and re-install my aerial that you took away when you installed.

Those were few and far between but it did happen!

Contractors are hard to enforce service level agreements with because they allways had a high turn over of staff, theres no substitute for using your own people. It may cost a few pounds more but it's easier to trace who's backside to kick if they are not doing their job.

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I doubt NTL will ever send Freeview signals down their cables.

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It would put them at an even greater competitive disadvantage to Sky. It would also suck bandwidth that could be used for Faster BB, more DTV channels, VOD, interactive etc.

I would hope they (and TW - well the combined entity) would fight such a suggestion vigourously.

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Would never suggest they would put COFDM signals down the network, they would have to install an aerial for the customer to replace any they removed when they installed.

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Unlikely, they may still be required to carry BBC1,2 ITV, C4, C5, however all of those in digital format can be squeezed onto a couple of channels, can't remember off the top of my head if freeview uses QAM16 or QPSK.

EDIT Just read quickly, it uses QPSK for test purposes only, and QAM16 and QAM64 out in the field, could get the above 5 channels at a high bitrate onto 2 DOCSIS channels.

I would hope they aren't required to carry any of it in that format, considering the issues that analogue causes would be lovely to see that UHF go where the sun doesn't shine.

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To confirm the angle I was coming from on this.

CableTel/ntl paid customers for their analogue dishes as an incentive to move to cable, in many cases they also removerd the UHF aerial for the customer as they told the customer it was not needed anymore.

This leaves a problem with customers who disconnect and the easy way around it for the guy doing the un-install is to leave the cabel connected so the customer can use the UHF by-pass channels.
In some cases where customers have been very pi**ed off wth ntl they have asked for the cable drop to be removed from the premisis entirely, in this instance customers who had their aerial removed by ntl would have no TV signals available. In the instances that I know of, (small in number that I am aware of) ntl has paid a contractor to fit a new aerial.

I was trying to point out in this thread that just because someone is not an ntl customer anymore doesn't necessarily mean in 100% of cases its a simple task of disconnecting their drop cable.

Perhaps future generations of cable boxes will have a built in GPS receiver so ntl can ping the box and get its location if its powered up and connected to the network.

I would like to point out again that ntl have little chance in hell of finding chipped boxes without being tipped off, or using the technology they have to narrow it down to the last 500 homes then ping the box whilst they disconnect all the drops in the area one by one to see which cable makes it disappear.

Don't let anyone bulls**t you into thinking there is cusrrently any other method available to them. ;)

ps: I understand the services went from 64 to a 16 constellation modulation format aftr ITV digital went bust, to make it a more robust reliable sevice. I understand it used COFDM either 2000 or 8000 carrier system.

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Well, apart from having the "you have won a prize, ring this number" channel :D

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It was possible to put a message on an individual box using the onscreen graphics with the old Jerrold analogue 2100 series boxes..

if it can be done with the digital boxes I guess they could use this facility!

perhaps they do and wont like us discussing that here. :rolleyes:

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There is the "messages" facility on the digital ones too.
Never seen it used though.

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I *nearly* typed a reply to this then realised I'd be giving away a recipe to make boxes muchly harder to detect.
In fact I think this thread is getting towards TMI state. While I appreciate freedom of information and everything else please people be careful, enough numpties with chipped boxes without giving extra info away *cough Escapee cough* ;)

Actually there are other ways to detect chipped boxes that just dissing each drop individually but that's another thing to get into.

Ta :)

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I am certainly not trying to get you to give more information away, it just gives me a wry smile on occassions where posters who work for ntl have used scaremongering statements to try and frighten would be customers of the "Box Chipping Brigade".

Yes I am aware of some measures that can be taken to narrow down potential users of chipped boxes, but no matter what cable network operator we are talking about the only solution is to 100% police the return of disconnected boxes. We all know that it is impossible and some customers will claim the box has been returned when it has not, I would expect it to be very difficult to charge a customer £1000 for a lost box as a deterent because the first genuine customer who takes it to court would not be asked to pay anymore than the box actually costs the cable operator.

There is unfortunately no method of locating a box to a house located on the network if it's illegal, MAC addresses are easily changable for those with the equipment and knowledge. I change MAC addresses on equipment daily, and I'm sure someone with more knowledge than myself in that are could take product XYZ and reverse engineer it.

I never heard anymore about the problems encountered on a certain operators network shortly after they launched digital services, we recovered a box from a customer due to "certain" technical issues and on returning to the headend with the box under our arm, we were still able to ping a box with the same MAC address and IP address on the network fed from the same hubsite.

That was all hushed up and we never actually found out if it was a vendor problem ie: 2 boxes with the same MAC address, or a cloned box. It would be one hell of a coincidence to have a vendor mistake and both boxes being located on the same hubsite. What was really funny as customer care arguing with customers who claimed they were being charged for movies they had not watched around the same time, the company denied that this was possible and would not remove the charges for the films from these couple of customers. The multiple address problem was never followed up and I know the box we recovered was from a genuine paying subscriber, so it was the Real McCoy!

There will always be people out there who want to get something for nothing, and companies will always make amazing claims about their facilities for pinpointing these people.

I remember how much difficulty we had finding a babbling box one day, and that was on constant transmit whilst we were searching for it. It ended up located in the Set-Top clean and screen facility, and we got there just as the batch were about to be packed up and sent out for customer use.
I have no intention of giving away what I know would help the rogues, but still dont agree with BS to put people off.

Re: Chipped boxes
 

If the cable providers wanted to erradicate the problem, why not just cut off the supply to boxes with a non bonafide return path. If their return path does not check out, then the box either is cloned, chipped or filtered. Cut it off.

The problem is that this would catch customers with a basic package getting top package channels. Stopping these guys means stopping a cable customer. As Sky are paid for the high value channels and ntl/TW are paid on the lower channels, then until Sky demand action, there is no incentive for cable cos IMHO.

Thoughts?

Re: Chipped boxes
 

Escapee you used to work for ntl and now don't. There are ways to improve detection and I'm not BSing anyone.

kobuskint - no chance of working at all, for obvious (if you know what you are looking for) reasons. Not going to elaborate any more than that.

Re: Chipped boxes
 

I am not saying that ntl have not got smarter in detecting illegal boxes on the network, I am however saying that Langley headend areas would be restricted to the amount of nodes that are combined to an individual Intersect card.

The original config combined 2 rings of nodes to a Intercect card, that means an illegal box could of been in one of 800 homes in the 2 ring area. (that assumes the original 500 homes per node build not the later 1000+)
Even upgrading to one Intersect card per node (Cant see why they would in its currect application) would only place the illegal box in one of the 500 possible homes fed from that node, we can be fair and say that could be further reduced to about 200-300 customers to allow for a reasonable penetration in the area.

200-300 drops plus all the ones that have not been disconnected are a lot of leg work and time to check, things can be broken down further by using the RF directional coupler test points firstly at the hubsite, possibly using Cheetah to identify the node, and then at the node usiing test points to identify which Distribution amplifier, exactly the same can then be carried out there and then on to the Distribution Point or points depending how many are fed off that amplifier port. That would probably break things down to a minimum of 50 drops to test. Perhaps they can then run a report to find out how many of those 50 drops are paying customers and how many are on the basic package, as they are more likely to contain the offending box.

As the casual observer will of probably guessed by now, travelling around all these cabinets and eventually removing all those drop cables to identify a single house containing the offending set-top box is very time consuming indeed. It's far easier to scaremonger the casual person who may be offered the chipped box down the pub than it is to catch offenders.

None of that info is company specific to ntl, its all general HFC architecture related and would apply to most operators with HFC systems around the world. The only differences would be homes passed per node and segmentation of Intersect/ubr.

If it was easy for Cable operators to detect a box to a house they wouldn't have so much of a fraud problem.

PS: If anyone from ntl is concerned that I am giving away company specific info it's not the case, most of the fundamental design is based on industry standard designs supplied by the equipment vendors and is freely available.
I actually raised a concern over an issue with an old boss of mine at ntl over some freely available information that CS, Tech support people and senior engineering people who should of known better were making available back in the .com days.

The information they were innocently giving out could potentially cause ntl a lot of nightmares, especially in the current situation where they are very thinm on the ground with people actually out at the sharp end getting their sleeves rolled up! :rolleyes:

Re: Chipped boxes
 

*Shrug* as I said this is a conversation best had in private, I'm not scare mongering anyone, nor am I going to give much away but I'd rather not give away hints as to how to avoid detection.

Re: Chipped boxes
 

hi i recently bought a box from the uk its not chipped just tried to switch it on with cable feed in it goes throught process says error 2 on it then cannont find a signal please check signal goes to channel 0 and displays that message could any 1 tell me wat is up with this box and is it of any use to any 1 else?

Re: Chipped boxes
 

Assuming you are using it on an NTL or Telewest network, I don't think you'll be able to. As I understand it, the boxes on each network are restricted to working on that network. You may be in the same area as the person who sold the box, but bear in mind that NTL's network areas do not necessarily line up with the physical area (one network may service two or three areas).


One final thing.. It is illegal to sell both NTL and Telewest boxes. They are rented out to each subscriber, but they remain the property of the cable company.

Re: Chipped boxes
 

ntl should reclaim all the boxes from ex customers and make any of them who havent got the box still pay for them....
no one seems to have mentioned the fact that everyone with a chipped box is a paying ntl customer because they all pay the for the minimum channel package and get a new box , switch it for the chipped box ,and then get every other chan including pay-per-view and porn for free.......thats why they go uncaught
so ntl only need to do a swift update zap of all there base package customers and the ones with chipped boxes will not work until they are rechipped to the new signal.......im sure this could be done on a regular basis.
doing nothing makes a mockery of people like me that pay nearly a hundred quid a month for everything.

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Back in the old days though, the cable company I originally worked for would make more from a basic customer than one with a full package. It was all to do with the way Sky was pricing to cable operators, and meant there was more profit margin on a basic package customer than full package. Hard to believe but true!

I accept that the pricing plan today may be different, but it was just not worth the effort of chasing a customer who was robbing service. The end result would be Sky making more money and the cable operator would get less. The company always made the minimum effort required for Sky to think the cheats were being sought. :D