From what's visible in the second photo, things look fairly legit (albeit shoddy) if the power feed is coming through the wall at the center of the image and the transformer is on the left below the ledge and the wires to/from it are going down through the hole and the wires heading out of the frame to the left are simply a splice between the feed line and the leads on the transformer.

Now if he cracked open the transformer and found a transmitter hidden inside - then it might get interesting...