Yes. For example, someone signed up for 58,000 accounts and used them to receive micro deposits (those small sums that are deposited into an account to validate that two accounts are linked correctly). They had their time in court: https://www.wired.com/2008/05/man-allegedly-b/
Shell companies are not normally used for structuring. That's a different matter entirely. A shell company is usually a holding company, not a company created in order to deceive or to bypass a hard cap on some scarce resource.
Well, there are the fake registrars, such as DropCatch 345, DropCatch 346, DropCatch 347, ... DropCatch 1545. Those are all ICANN-accredited registrars.[1] ICANN parcels out dropped domains among all the registrars who want them at random. Having a thousand dummy registrars improves the odds. That's definitely "structuring" to hog Internet assets.
This is possible only because, while ICANN charges each registry when they acquire a domain, ICANN refunds that if they give the domain back within some time period.
It's both. You could say that the .org debacle more strongly indicates corruption than dysfunction, but it's definitely both with strong ties between them.
As strange and dysfunctional as that is, DropCatch isn't trying to deceive ICANN into thinking those registrars are unrelated companies, so it's not fraud.
I've looked up wire fraud in the US and it seems to come with some properly serious penalties:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.[4]
Advertising has specific legal limits on what is deceptive. You can say ‘worlds best’ because that’s considered a subjective and meaningless statement, but lying about objective facts gets you into hot water. For example, peanut butter is legally required to have been made from peanuts.
You going to work also serves the purpose "to get somebody to [give you] money they otherwise wouldn't have". So that definition is obviously too broad, and different from the definition of fraud mentioned above.
Advertisement tends to deal in opinions, not facts. And where specific factual claims are made against better knowledge it does constitute fraud, and is occasionally prosecuted. See Volkswagen's emissions claims, for example. Or, just this week, some hand sanitiser got hit by the FDA for claiming protection against Ebola and Coronavirus.
To be more precise, the elements of fraud include a false statement, made knowingly, upon which someone else reasonably relies, to their detriment. To prosecute, this pattern must not be merely plausibly true but persuasively true in the face of a motivated, skilled defense. That set of circumstances is only rarely true in advertising. It is clearly true here.
People get sued for false advertising al the time. I feel like people on hacker news are continuously surprised to discover that laws exist and are enforced.