2 Men Arrested in Probe of Illegal Cable TV Box Sales

Bau Nguyen’s neighbors in his pricey La Canada Flintridge neighborhood said they always found it a little strange that United Parcel Service made deliveries to the imposing Nguyen residence every single day.

But they were nevertheless shocked when a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and Time Warner cable investigators swooped into the quiet neighborhood Friday morning and arrested Nguyen, seizing more than 350 illegal cable boxes worth an estimated $2 million.

After searching Nguyen’s business papers, deputies rushed off to an apartment complex in the San Gabriel Valley, where they arrested Nguyen’s brother, Joseph, said Sheriff’s Lt. Mike O’Brien.

They also seized an additional 100 cable boxes, along with an EPROM burner capable of reprogramming computer chips in cable boxes.

Investigators say they believe the brothers were at the center of an operation that sold illegal cable boxes for up to $300 each.

Both men were charged with unauthorized possession of cable descramblers, a felony punishable by up to one year in county jail. They are being held on $500,000 bail each.

Buyers from the Los Angeles area, who might not have realized the practice was illegal, used the pirated boxes to receive every channel offered by their local cable company without paying a cent, O’Brien said.

Inside Nguyen’s two-story, white-columned home, investigators also found a “hacker’s bible,” which listed the electronic codes for almost every cable company in the United States.

Sheriff’s investigators from the department’s Asian Crime Task Force say they were tipped off to Nguyen’s scheme by Time Warner detectives who saw an advertisement for cable boxes in a Filipino newspaper. Time Warner is involved because the cable industry is concerned about revenues lost from pirated cable boxes.

That ad led investigators to a post office box in Nevada, and then to a business in Las Vegas and finally to Nguyen’s home in La Canada Flintridge. They don’t yet know where the trail will end, O’Brien said.

“There may be more people out there. We want to send a message to the general public, ‘Hey, don’t buy these, you could go to jail too,’ ” O’Brien said. “The video pirate police are coming.”

Nguyen’s neighbors, who gaped at the rows of cable boxes lined up outside the house Friday, said they were stunned that such a crime had touched their neighborhood nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, where homes are valued at millions of dollars.

Jesus Partida, who lives next door, said he and Nguyen had just finished putting up a fence between their two properties but that he didn’t know Nguyen, his wife, or their three children very well.

“They kept to themselves,” he said.

Fifty yards away, Nguyen’s wife and another woman cleaned up the cardboard boxes that had held the contraband and then silently shut the garage door.

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This story has been edited to reflect a correction to the original published text. An EPROM burner was misidentified as an “e-prompt burner.”

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