Talk to a cable guy who serviced the “inner-city” or a college town about the rats nests of spliced cable they would locate.
They never sought compensation or criminal charges for the theft of the service.
When a technician came out to unhook all the illegal splices as soon as they would leave people would be up on ladders “reconnecting” everything.
I think now you have to use a return signal to the company (for ordering stuff/streaming etc) so it is probably a lot harder to steal cable but I don’t know. Have not subscribed to any TV in 8 years and dumped Netflix a few years ago.
I also assume that the way most cable TV programming is now distributed that thievery is now almost non-existent. Comparing friends and family sharing account access within the limits established by the services themselves to thievery is silly. We use the basic Amazon Prime music streaming service. If you try to listen to it on more than one device at a time it will either ask if you want to disconnect the other streaming device or just not work depending on the device. The same is true of other types of streaming services. The premium Netflix service allows 4 devices at a time to stream content, the basic allows just 1. We subscribe to a premium "Sling TV" plan which allows 3 devices at once to stream. We share this with my parents. Cheaper plans allow only 1 device to stream at a time. We pay extra to be able to share... it is a feature; I have not spent a lot of time reading through the constantly changing user agreements, but this was discussed with customer service and was suggested to us by one of their representatives when trying to decide on the best plan for us.