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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) discovered a fraud scheme in late-2018 through which 757,760 IPv4 addresses worth between $9,850,880 and $14,397,440 were fraudulently obtained.

ARIN is a nonprofit corporation which distributes Internet number resources such as IPv4, IPv6, and Autonomous System numbers to organizations throughout the United States, Canada, and Caribbean and North Atlantic islands.

"On May 1, 2019, ARIN obtained a final and very favorable arbitration award which included revocation of all resources issued pursuant to fraud and $350,000 to ARIN for its legal fees," says a press release issued by ARIN on May 13.

ARIN was able to uncover and revoke the IPv4 addresses obtained through the fraud scheme following the arbitration [arin.net] [PDF] in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, with the individual and the company behind the scheme being charged in federal court in a twenty-counts of wire fraud indictment.

As a Department of Justice (DoJ) press release [justice.gov] issued today says, the two accused parties "created and utilized 'Channel Partners,' which purported to consist of several individual businesses, all of whom acquired the right to IP addresses from the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN)."

Source: BleepingComputer [bleepingcomputer.com]

Original Submission