James Delahunty
12 Dec 2004 7:40
Martin Mullen, a 50 year old Canadian Man, has been jailed for 7 years after he admitted to being the leader of a sophisticated satellite TV piracy ring that sold hacked smart cards in Canada and the United States. He was also ordered to pay a sum of $24m to DirecTV and their smart card provider NDS Ltd. He pled guilty in a federal court in Tampa, Florida in September last year to conspiracy to violate anti-piracy laws and entering the United States illegally after being deported years earlier in an unrelated matter. Mullen has been called an expert at cracking smart cards that are issues to subscribers which allow them to view TV channels that they pay for.
Usually, when a subscriber inserts the card into the set top box, a satellite signal will then determine which channels this user is allowed to watch. This operation is based by a unique identification number that is coded into every issued smart card. Mullen apparently headed a network of over 100 individuals that sell thousands of hacked smart cards which allow access to all channels. "The severe sentence handed down by the court is clearly warranted in this case and we applaud the judge's decision," said Jim Whalen, senior director of DirecTV's Signal Integrity Department, in a statement. "This sentence serves as a stark reminder that the sale and distribution of signal theft devices has grave consequences."
The sentence was decided by the amount of financial damage Mullen’s actions caused for DirecTV. The court accepted that Mullen has been responsible for at least 16,000 hacked smart cards in use and each caused damages of $1,500, giving a total of $24m. DirecTV estimates that Mullen’s network is responsible for about 68,000 hacked smart cards on the street. Mullen is now in custody at the Miami Federal Detention Center, and quite amusingly, NDS are currently trying to crack the encryption on a memory stick seized from him. They hope it will contain numbers for offshore bank accounts where they believe Mullen has stashed millions of dollars.
Source:
The Register