Help me remember an old anti-satellite-piracy sting from the 1980s

January 11, 2023 9:56 AM

I am 99% sure that I read an article about the constant battles between pay-tv providers and backyard satellite pirates/decryptors in the 1970s and 1980s, and it had a funny story about a pay-per-view sting operation. Basically: somehow the broadcaster of a big event (Wrestlemania? A boxing match?) inserted a fake commercial only into the pirated stream that promised a free t-shirt of similar gift to people who called or wrote in. And then when people did, BLAMMO they got busted.

It was kind of like Pee-Wee's idea of offering a giant reward for his stolen bike: whoever claims the reward was the thief and so they are ineligible. Anyway, Google fails me. Does anyone know the details about this? Was it real? Did it work?

(Bonus request - if you have any good recommendations about the early days/ways of the people with giant satellites in their backyards, I'd love to read it)

posted by AgentRocket to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: Was it perhaps the Black Sunday hack? Neat write-up on that back-and-forth, with a big payoff, but it wasn't a fake commercial in this instance but segments of a program getting smuggled in & then activated before the Super Bowl.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:14 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe match, Nov. 13, 1992, and a local-market Connecticut ad for an $18 commemorative t-shirt.

Scores of boxing fans who responded to a T-shirt offer during the broadcast of a heavyweight title fight in November could find it to be an expensive purchase. Continental Cablevision, which broadcast a T-shirt offer only to viewers who were obtaining the pay-per-view signal illegally, wants $2,000 each from the 140 north central Connecticut customers who responded. (Hartford Courant reprint, Feb 02, 1993; archived link)

Also: TV viewers who called a toll-free number last week to get a free T-shirt instead found themselves in trouble with the cable company. Racine TeleCable had scrambled the Sci Fi Channel signal so the only viewers who got it were those with illegal decoding equipment, system general manager Kevin Anthony said. TeleCable periodically ran a phone number across the screen for viewers to call for a free T-shirt. The test nabbed at least six cable pirates, he said. (Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 17, 1992, dateline: Racine, Wisconsin; archived link) At least six! Boy howdy.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:20 AM on January 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: Brilliant! 25 minutes and I've not not just the answer from Iris Gambol but a great story from CrystalDave. Thanks so much.
posted by AgentRocket at 10:40 AM on January 11, 2023

If you want more technical stuff about the cat-and-mouse games the broadcasters played with the pirates there's a Wired article from 2008 that's pretty good. The guy in the article created the Black Sunday countermeasure.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:44 AM on January 11, 2023

Oops that link is a dupe, sorry.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:56 AM on January 11, 2023

No recommendations per se but I spent a good while from the late 70's to late 80's with a big satellite dish in my fathers back yard. The scrambling/piracy things seem to be a bit later that I remember, or we just weren't that interested in the things that were scrambled. But I do sorta remember the beginnings of the descrambler sort of thing that was like needing to buy an extra piece of kit just for that channel and probably paying for a new little card of some sort every month for that new piece of kit. Mostly never bothered. I also have same early era stories about exploiting/hacking early cable boxes to unscramble pay channels and some electrical engineering type building descrambler boxes. But pretty soon after my exposure things went more digital and a bit harder to circumvent. While it lasted, the satellite TV was pretty cool.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:50 AM on January 13, 2023