Benjamin Smith III, a 41 years old Florida citizen, is perhaps one of the first to face charges for such a common practice. Smith was arrested in April and this month a pretrial hearing should be taking place on charges of "unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony".
Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon's house using a laptop computer.
The practice is so new that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement doesn't even keep statistics, according to the St. Petersburg Times, which reported Smith's arrest this week.
I guess this makes for a very peculiar case as this person was not connecting to a neighbor's wireless network from his own home, but sitting outside somebody else's house with the sole purpose of stealing his net bandwidth.