Digital Thievery going up?

Yesterday, I heard from a neighbor, that another neighbor got a $500 bill on his Direct TV notice for ordering movies that he never watched.

Today I saw this on CNN.com

www.cnn.com...

A man was charged $62,000 for downloading a movie.

Is this some sort of hacking? or are companies really ripping these people off?

EDIT: Link directly to the clip didn't work right, but it's on their main page as a link.

[edit on 24-4-2009 by dragonking76]

It's usually the compainies doing it on purpose to get more money, then put it down at a later date(when they get proved wrong) to a computer glitch.

It involves computers.

Computers are made by people. People make mistakes. Mistakes are built into computers regularly, none are perfect.
Other people can exploit mistakes to make 'accidents' or 'errors' happen on their own accord.

On a slightly related note, 80% of air crashes are due to human error...

I've heard about identity theft on the news, just never had heard of someone in my area being a victim of some sort of scam(company driven or otherwise) via computerized documentation.

I hadn't heard of someone being robbed via movie ordering, until the past 2 days. I just thought it was odd that these two instances(there may be others) happened so close together in time-frame.

On the CNN video, the guy says he was able to talk them down to $17,000 owed for the download of the movie.