Pair ran £1m TV scam from spare room (From Daily Echo)
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Steven Kaye and Nicholas Pulsford ran £1m TV scam from spare room in Chandler's Ford
11:38am Tuesday 4th September 2012 in Crime
By Sian Davies, Senior News Reporter
Steven Kaye
IT was a set up of which Del Boy and Arthur Daley would have been proud.
Friends Steven Kaye and Nicholas Pulsford offered to provide viewers with satellite channels at a fraction of what it would cost from channels such as Sky or ESPN.
Purporting to be a global network with bases around the world, the operation was in fact run out of a spare room in Kaye’s £330,000 Chandler’s Ford home with a huge satellite dish positioned in the garden, Southampton Crown Court was told.
Such was its size it could be seen on Google Street View as it balanced on top of the shed.
By purchasing a legitimate viewing card from each of the main service providers and using a computer, the pair sold set-top boxes that could decode a signal transmitted from the server through a normal satellite dish, prosecutor James Kellam said.
However, many customers were left disappointed after the boxes, which turned out to be cloned sub-standard devices from a contact in China, were often returned by those who could not get them to work.
The court was told how the pair charged £50 for a threemonth period and at the time they were caught in April 2010 they had just under 1,000 people signed up to the enterprise that they had been running for about two years.
Mr Kellam estimated that Sky would have earned around £1m if all those customers had received their television signal legitimately through them.
Pleading guilty to a charge of possessing an unauthorised decoder, the pair were described as “backdoor entrepreneurs”.
Neither, it was claimed by their defence, earned any more than £10,000 from the operation due to its lack of sophistication and number of returns.
Despite living in a leafy Hampshire suburb Kaye was described as struggling with debt totalling £100,000.
Mitigating, Leah Dillon added: “He has a house with no equity and has three children to pay for. He is not living the lifestyle of the rich.”
Father of two Pulsford, from Hornchurch in Essex, was described as a failed businessman by his counsel, who had bought a house beyond his means with his first wife who he had since divorced.
Sentencing the pair to six months in prison suspended for two years, an order for them both to complete 250 hours of community service and the payment of £1,125 each in costs, Judge Gary Burrell QC described them as running a “ramshackle” business .
He said: “Selling equipment to bypass services that the rest of us have to pay for is in my judgement a very serious offence.”
He added that the fact they were selling substandard equipment could be seen as an aggravating feature of the case.
Officer in the case Det Con Mark Southey said: “I hope this case serves as a deterrent for those who think they can by-pass legitimate ways of receiving goods and services. It should also serve as a warning to those who buy such equipment that they will have little or no redress if and when it goes wrong.”
Comments(22)
andysaints007
says...
12:30pm Tue 4 Sep 12
sarfhamton
says...
12:48pm Tue 4 Sep 12
andysaints007 wrote:Suspended sentence! Worth a risk for alot of people
Great to see a sentence that will deter others !!
The Libertine
says...
2:33pm Tue 4 Sep 12
Sky are the biggest criminals here.
Shoong
says...
2:53pm Tue 4 Sep 12
The Libertine wrote:Does that make it ok to rip them off? No.
"Sky would have earned around £1m if all those customers had received their television signal legitimately through them."
Sky are the biggest criminals here.
Georgem
says...
2:53pm Tue 4 Sep 12
The Libertine wrote:To say nothing of the fact that that's a bogus argument anyway. A lot of those people simply wouldn't have bothered.
"Sky would have earned around £1m if all those customers had received their television signal legitimately through them."
Sky are the biggest criminals here.
sfby
says...
2:58pm Tue 4 Sep 12
lymicherry
says...
4:22pm Tue 4 Sep 12
sfby wrote:My thoughts exactly.
How very Daily Mail - shoehorning the value of the house in for no apparent reason....
slippery
says...
4:28pm Tue 4 Sep 12
clausentum
says...
4:37pm Tue 4 Sep 12
jonnyx
says...
5:06pm Tue 4 Sep 12
george chivers
says...
6:39pm Tue 4 Sep 12
TheJoiners
says...
7:09pm Tue 4 Sep 12
Unlucky lads, try and get indoor comm service, much nicer than digging holes :-)
nicko
says...
7:17pm Tue 4 Sep 12
,if youve a mobile phone that can receive tv channels just get your usb and plug into your tv you can watch any channel in the world ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,why pay sky
andysaints007
says...
7:52pm Tue 4 Sep 12
sarfhamton wrote:I was being sarcastic !
andysaints007 wrote:Suspended sentence! Worth a risk for alot of people
Great to see a sentence that will deter others !!
S Pance
says...
9:24pm Tue 4 Sep 12
TheJoiners wrote:They weren't offering free Sky. They were charging for it.
Do gooders make me laugh. If any of you had had a knock at the door offering you FREE sky rather than pay there rip offf prices you would have bitten there arms off. Sky isnt a corner shop its a multi billion pound orginisation ran buy some of the biggest crooks in the world. Unlucky lads, try and get indoor comm service, much nicer than digging holes :-)
S Pance
says...
9:31pm Tue 4 Sep 12
It simply beggars belief!
A lot of knowledge is required to set up a card sharing server like this and various bits of equipment need to be purchased and you need to know where to buy this from. Yet these geezers didn't know how to make more than a pound per month from their "subscribers"?
Someone is having a laugh, they really are..
mikeyblue2
says...
7:40am Wed 5 Sep 12
CruelDevil
says...
10:19am Wed 5 Sep 12
TheJoiners wrote:And if I saw an old lady fall down in the street...I would obviously take the opportunity to mug her!
Do gooders make me laugh. If any of you had had a knock at the door offering you FREE sky rather than pay there rip offf prices you would have bitten there arms off. Sky isnt a corner shop its a multi billion pound orginisation ran buy some of the biggest crooks in the world. Unlucky lads, try and get indoor comm service, much nicer than digging holes :-)
(sorry - but make a stupid statement and expect stupid responses!)
Georgem
says...
10:24am Wed 5 Sep 12
TheJoiners wrote:"Do gooders"?
Do gooders make me laugh. If any of you had had a knock at the door offering you FREE sky rather than pay there rip offf prices you would have bitten there arms off. Sky isnt a corner shop its a multi billion pound orginisation ran buy some of the biggest crooks in the world.
Unlucky lads, try and get indoor comm service, much nicer than digging holes :-)
TheJoiners
says...
3:59pm Wed 5 Sep 12
CruelDevil
says...
11:52am Thu 6 Sep 12
What is the difference between stealing from Sky and stealing from an old lady?...nothing! stealing is stealing, and therefore is a crime. Do gooder maybe, but I wouldn't have bought a £50 box from these guys in the same way I wouldn't buy stolen goods or expect to get something for nothing!
cliffwalker says...
12:01pm Tue 4 Sep 12