No-one sane does anything seriously criminal trough their own link. I built a simple directional wlan antenna. In my small city, within range of my balcony, there are some 300 open or WEP-protected networks. Not that I'd ever steal someone else's internet...
You wouldn't steal a car...
Breaking into someone's network is quite a nasty offence in itself. In Australia (where the story is from), that's hundreds of thousands in fines and jail time.
If you're doing it right you aren't doing it at home.
Wouldn't a VPN be good enough?
They can still monitor traffic peaks and match those to when criminal activity occurred.
Would that hold up in court? Anyway, I would just saturate the VPN.