I can come up with at least 3 distinct meanings for “amassed VPN clients” and I’m still not 100% sure which is correct in this context. I take it that clients here refers to “paying customers”?
> He said Micfo provides a legitimate service to VPNs, adding that whatever his customers or their users do through Micfo servers is none of his business.
From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.
A former employer used to rent IPs, the person renting ranges had different companies own each block to reduce abuse report blast radius. We also owned a ton of IPs and never really had to prove utilization when requesting new blocks from ARIN as of 2011.
I'd guess he pissed off some important people... If this prosecution doesn't succeed, you can bet every tax return of his for the last 20 years will suddenly be randomly checked, and he'll be prosecuted for claiming a Starbucks coffee as an expense during a business meeting when he actually took half the coffee away after the meeting making it not an allowable expense, and therefore technically fraud.
That's what I've been thinking as well. Creating "shell companies" (aka "Special Purpose Entities/Vehicles") is not illegal per se.
Perhaps he violated the terms and conditions of his contract with ARIN and should have had the assignments cancelled but where does the criminality come in?
If he misrepresented himself in order to gain a financial advantage then that is fraud.
Creating shell companies is not illegal, using a name fir yourself that isn’t your legal name is not illegal, doing either of those things in order to trick people into giving you money is.
Not just financial advantage, all deceit where you intend to gain from it is fraud. Money just makes it more obvious what the gain was.
Are there grey areas? Sure. In particular there's a passive sort of deceit in which you let people assume things that you know aren't true, to your benefit. Mostly the law holds that it's their mistake for not asking, and anyway they'd usually be far too embarrassed to make a fuss if they realise their error.
I don't see that here, the plan was explicitly to trick the RIR into giving them resources they were otherwise not entitled to. Those resources were for everybody to share, they're stealing from you and it's appropriate to prosecute for fraud.
> I don't see that here, the plan was explicitly to trick the RIR into giving them resources they were otherwise not entitled to. Those resources were for everybody to share, they're stealing from you and it's appropriate to prosecute for fraud.
The last time I looked which was a couple of years ago there was nothing in the ARIN TOS that said "you can only control one entity that applies for resources".
Joe Schmoe Enterprises, Inc, Joe Schmoe, LLC, Joe Shmoe Fishing Services, Inc are different legal entities even if Joe Schmoe, Jr owns all of them.
> Creating shell companies is not illegal, using a name fir yourself that isn’t your legal name is not illegal, doing either of those things in order to trick people into giving you money is.
Have you seen a list of list of all telco companies that are together AT&T which exist solely to allow AT&T to limit liability, create a separation of entities for qualify under some rules for some other entities, etc?
When MCI Worldcom filed for bankruptcy the list of the entities that it covered took a couple of pages in major newspapers.
From what I understand he was attributed many IPs by creating shell companies and rented these IPs to VPN providers.