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...

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.

You wouldn't steal a car...

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.