Sounds like I need to target wire fraud as well, with drug cultivation/sales, firearm manufacture/sale/possession (even by a felon), and tax evasion to my list of charges to jury nullify on...
It's hardly victimless-- when you lie to get something of value that would otherwise go to other people, and then sell it, you're ripping those people off.
> No one lost anything here. At worst rent seekers didn’t get to collect rent for something that cost them nothing.
This was your original comment.
The opposite is true here: a person received addresses at low costs reserved for people who don't have any addressing of their own, and then sold the addresses for millions of dollars to companies who already have a lot of addresses and would be ineligible for this.
They pretended to be dozens of new companies to do this. They filed false affidavits where they swore facts that were untrue.
Meanwhile companies actually eligible for ARIN's initial block policy had to wait indefinitely because this scalper had snatched up all the inventory. Were they not harmed?
Fraud basically means lying to someone to steal from them. Wire fraud means doing that using electronic communications.
Of course there can be bogus charges and you should vote to acquit on those, but wire fraud seems squarely in the set of things that should be illegal if we have laws at all.