Um. This is not legal. Sorry to tell you this. The dealers will tell you it is legal but if you look at most of their websites it says all sorts of disclaimer stuff saying you shouldn't be doing naughty stuff with their products, blah blah, cya.
If you get DirecTV programming and do not pay for it, you are running a huge risk of being sued. Lawsuits are unfun.
If you buy something that appears to be designed to hack DirecTV programming, even if it doesn't work, DirecTV may sue you for posessing such devices.
The following is my understanding: DirecTV is aggressively going after what they term "End-User Pirates." They go after dealers and seize all their records. They often take over dealer websites and entrap people who purchase illegal devices. They monitor Ebay sales as well.
Without much more investigation than that, they send demand letters saying that they will sue unless you pay them four figure money. If you blow off their demand letter, they will sue you for six-figure money. It is hard to find competent lawyers to handle these cases because it usually costs more to defend the case with a good lawyer than what DirecTV demands.
So in the short term you might be saving some bucks, but DirecTV is not kidding around in going after people. Personally, I find some of their tactics in going after people deplorable because they do little investigation beyond sales records and have sued the wrong people--people who have had to hire lawyers to get the cases to go away.
(I know about this stuff because I had a friend who got in trouble for buying a device that never worked. So much for free pr0n and football.)
For more information, see:
http://www.directvdefense.org/hunt/
If you are in trouble, go here (I think you need to become a member of the forum to look at the DTV stuff):
http://forums.wumarkus.com/
This is what one of the members there says about the FTA stuff:
The short version of this is: Stealing is bad, don't do it.