Those detector vans were a hoax. I don’t have a TV licence because I don’t fit any of the criteria for requiring one. Screw taking it out of my tax instead.
The Rundfunkbeitrag is applied per household, not based on devices, and it's up to each person to either pay the tax or justify to the Beitragsservice that they don't need to.
Yeah, it's a pretty shitty system and I wish we would get rid of it. Don't have high hopes of that happening anytime soon though.
Their existence was not[0]. Maybe they didn't work. It sounds like they may have been a paper tiger.