[nicolaslem]

> 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.

[xfitm3]

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.

[wut42]

Why pursue him? What he's done has been done by many others since years.

[londons_explore]

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.

[ganoushoreilly]

He picked the fight foolishly by being greedy. He lived well beyond his means too and owes a lot of money to people you don’t want to owe.

[masayoshis_son]

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?

[qtplatypus]

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.

[tialaramex]

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.

[notyourday]

> 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.

[tialaramex]

The TOS only entitles you to keep the service you already have, you need more paperwork to get more resources assigned.

I presume the specific problem will have been when Joe Schmoe lied on the paperwork for IPv4 delegation to Joe Shmoe Fishing Services not mentioning that Joe Schmoe, LLC already has also applied, as has Joe Schmoe Enterprises, Inc. I'm not in ARIN's region, so I haven't seen their paperwork, but analogous paperwork in RIPE for example asks you about Related Entities because you're not entitled to duplicate resources just by asking more than once.

[kaetemi]

> all deceit where you intend to gain from it is fraud

Except if you're a magician, of course!

[tialaramex]

One of the things Teller (the magician) talks about is that while obviously you do want the audience to be "fooled" in some sense - that's what they're paying you for - you don't want to do that by straight lying to them. Where's the fun in that?

The goal is to create a scenario in which the audience knows they were tricked but can't figure out how. So you don't lie and say this is a random audience member when it's actually an employee "stooge". But when you're giving the genuinely random audience member a "free choice" of cards you don't need to explicitly tell the audience that, duh, as a magician you're not giving anybody a truly "free choice" of anything actually and you knew immediately which card they picked even without seeing it. That sort of thing.

[notyourday]

> 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.

[qtplatypus]

I am not sure of the point. Limiting liability is one of the things an LLC exists for.

[ganoushoreilly]

He flat out created new people and signed things via notary with fake names. He then tried to sell blocks to prohibited persons in prohibited regions.

Pull down the whole court doc, it’s pretty clear his intentions.