answer:In the old days (pre-digital cable), the cable companies didn’t really know. That made cable theft of service fairly easy. Currently, any cable system that uses digital cable has cable boxes (or cable cards) that use a specific digital identifier (not unlike the MAC address that your PC or laptop of phone has to connect to the internet). Any cable connection reads the digital ID of the cable box, and matches it to the one(s) on file for that customer, and then lets the signal go down the line. So the question I would have – in your apartment, is it digital cable or analog cable? From the sound of it, it’s analog, because that signal can’t be controlled / limited in the same way.