Everyone Is Stealing TV
February 10, 2026 at 11:57PMThese days, watching TV—shows, sports, and special events—means juggling and paying for multiple streaming subscriptions. Writing for The Verge, Janko Roettgers reports on the growing popularity of rogue streaming boxes like SuperBox and vSeeBox, which are showing up in more and more households across the US. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” one Texas reseller tells Roettgers. The boxes operate in a legal gray area, but many consumers, fed up with being nickel and dimed, don’t seem to care. Instead, they’re willing to pay several hundred dollars upfront for the promise of never paying for cable or streaming subscriptions again. But what are the real risks—for resellers and for consumers?
Midwestern church ladies in Illinois and Indian uncles in New Jersey all know someone who can hook you up: real estate agents, MMA fighters, wedding DJs, and special ed teachers are all among the sellers who form what amounts to a modern-day bootlegging scheme, car trunks full of streaming boxes just waiting for your call.
All of this doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the security of these devices. “You don’t know if there is any kind of malware built into the box,” says Mike, an IT worker from Pennsylvania who uses a vSeeBox. It’s a reasonable concern: In the past, cybercriminals have exploited insecure streaming boxes to commit ad fraud and other crimes. In a recent lawsuit, Google estimated that one such botnet consisted of 10 million streaming boxes and other personal devices, though the lawsuit did not mention vSeeBox or SuperBox as affected.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/10/superbox-vseebox-streaming/
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