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Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#171

Post by ozr »

nashashmi wrote: post #75

> Prosecutors showed that each of those shell companies involved the production of notarized affidavits in the names of people who didn’t exist. As a result, the government was able to charge Golestan with 20 counts of wire fraud — one for each payment made by the phony companies that bought the IP addresses from ARIN. Golestan created 20 companies under false names. And wrote 1 check from each company. Which means 2…

It's prosecutorial discretion. Generally speaking, they want to charge things that are a combination of big and easy-to-prove.

There's nothing beyond convention that would stop them from _also_ charging for creating companies under fictious names, for adding a wire fraud count for every e-mail he sent as one of the people, for not including their real address on any marketing e-mails they sent, etc etc.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#172

Post by Jenk »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #166
Jenk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks like an old photo, the dress and hair are very reminiscent of early-mid 00s style.

Article says he's 40. 2023 - 40 is ... Yeah, that can't be it.

The pic lists his DOB as 1983 so yeah, he looks like he is in his 20s in that pic. I don't understand your point.

Searching his name instantly shows images with a mich more contemporary look, and somelooking 15+ years older than that of the article's image.

Furthermore the pic in the article lists his title as "Executive Director" and makes reference to his launch of a company in 2005.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#173

Post by ozr »

goalonetwo wrote: post #35
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a smart entrepreneur he was to commit fraud!

messing up and defrauding that way doesn't negate the fact that you still need to be smart on some level(depending on your definition) to create an IT company. We should definitely punish the fraud. But also look at rehabilitation. In this case, we are taking someone that could under the right circumstance be a net positive for society and putting him in jail for 5 years where he will most probably come out as a dest…

He didn't 'mess up'. This wasn't an accident. Wire fraud has an intent requirement. The government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendent acted with the intent to defraud, specifically, the 'intent to deceive and cheat'.

Not punishing this is the same as allowing it.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#175

Post by preinheimer »

overgard wrote: post #47

Honest question, why are we not all just on IPV6 now? It seems like at this point almost all the underlying hardware and software should support it? It seems like the only argument for sticking with IPv4 is NAT, but I can't think of a technical reason we couldn't do NAT with IPv6?

Big cloud providers have good IPv6 support. The long tail is terrible. We work with ~200 different hosting providers, half of them have no IPv6 support at all, another ~15% it only works occasionally and they clearly don't monitor it.

There's also a fair number of still popular libraries and frameworks that don't handle IPv6 well. Maybe not in their latest release, but in their more popular older ones.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#176

Post by hiatus »

hinkley wrote: post #133
chatmasta wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently between 15 and 30 percent of the recovered proceeds: > In general, the IRS will pay an award of at least 15 percent, but not more than 30 percent of the proceeds collected attributable to the information submitted by the whistleblower. https://www.irs.gov/compliance/whistleblower-office

On (taxes and fines on) 2 billion? That’s practically conspiracy-to-whistleblow territory. Get a couple coworkers to help you collect evidence.

You might be interested to know that there are apparently companies out there that identify people within organizations that may have the access and appropriate demeanor and attempt to get them to whistleblow. It was covered in an episode of Darknet Diaries. https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/80/

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#177

Post by pierat »

floren wrote: post #55
overgard wrote: post #47

Honest question, why are we not all just on IPV6 now? It seems like at this point almost all the underlying hardware and software should support it? It seems like the only argument for sticking with IPv4 is NAT, but I can't think of a technical reason we couldn't do NAT with IPv6?

NAT is a strong argument against IPv4 -- it's an absolute pain in the ass for bidirectional communication. Yeah, NAT acts as a defacto firewall, but you can just... use a real firewall.

As a content company who owns ISPs, I would LOVE NATs.

Why? Keeps P2P like BitTorrent, soulseek, gnutella, and newer protocols crippled. And content creators don't want people consuming content other than through themselves.

And a NAT can also differentiate between "consumer household" and "business" - do you get a real IP or not?

It's also why companies like Comcast zero-rate their own content.

EDIT: for you -1'ers ; you DO realize that most mega-ISP-content companies want the push-style of the television back, right? And these companies will institute NAT, data caps, and "3 strikes" to boot people off.

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#178

Post by bhdlr »

rs999gti wrote: post #113
kstrauser wrote: post #9

The underlying crime was wire fraud, and it happened to be about acquiring IP addresses. He wasn’t prosecuted because he got too many, but for how he got them.

> The underlying crime was wire fraud The other crime was looking like a douche canoe for his profile pic - https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/amirg...

He looks like he was in a goth band while he was getting really good grades at one of Canada's top business schools

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#179

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

xwdv wrote: post #123
kstrauser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Also, you do not want the Postal Inspectors showing up looking for you. Like, for real.

I once committed mail fraud when I was 17 years old. I had been using the return address as a destination address on envelopes to send mail to places for free without stamps. Finally got caught one day at the local branch. Postal Inspectors said I could face 20 to 30 years in federal prison.

That's insane. 20 to 30 years in federal prison for having defrauded the post of how many letters? Imagining you've been sending couple of letters a weeks at most, that's like what? $10 per months!?

Re: Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme

#180

Post by deathanatos »

floren wrote: post #55
overgard wrote: post #47

Honest question, why are we not all just on IPV6 now? It seems like at this point almost all the underlying hardware and software should support it? It seems like the only argument for sticking with IPv4 is NAT, but I can't think of a technical reason we couldn't do NAT with IPv6?

NAT is a strong argument against IPv4 -- it's an absolute pain in the ass for bidirectional communication. Yeah, NAT acts as a defacto firewall, but you can just... use a real firewall.

It's an absolute pain for even single direction communication, as most NATs are going to be stateful — they have to retain, somewhere, the mapping between internal IP/port & external port. And that mapping is in finite memory, and old mappings are usually timed out of it, killing the connection, if there is one.

(You can hack around this with keepalives, but it's just another PITA because of the original sin of breaking the end to end principle.)

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