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Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

wsj.com

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Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#71

Post by jfim »

smnrchrds wrote: post #69
commandersaki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was done to deceive ARIN which is why it is being considered wire fraud.

So if I sign up for a service with different email addresses to use the 2-week free trial over and over, I will be guilty of wire fraud?

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/

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#72

Post by smnrchrds »

dlgeek wrote: post #70
smnrchrds wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I sign up for a service with different email addresses to use the 2-week free trial over and over, I will be guilty of wire fraud?

Yes, and they'd probably throw a CFAA violation in there too.

Wow! I shouldn't be surprised, yet I am, that three felonies a day was right.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#73

Post by qtplatypus »

notyourday wrote: post #28
qtplatypus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

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

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#74

Post by paulie_a »

empath75 wrote: post #64
Mirioron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, where does that leave advertising? The entire purpose of advertising is to get somebody to spend money on a product they otherwise wouldn't have.

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.

And when they are enforced they seem to think that laws can be hacked with cutesy little games to a judge.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#75

Post by comex »

Animats wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#76

Post by jacquesm »

pjmorris wrote: post #68
blitmap wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring I didn't know there was a formal term for this. Splitting up money transfers to avoid detection of large sums moving around.

Sounds like packet switching.

No, more like packet fragmentation and reassembly.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#77

Post by zbentley »

smnrchrds wrote: post #69
commandersaki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was done to deceive ARIN which is why it is being considered wire fraud.

So if I sign up for a service with different email addresses to use the 2-week free trial over and over, I will be guilty of wire fraud?

Intent matters. Scale of abuse matters qualitatively.

The legal system does not operate like a computer program.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#78

Post by _-___________-_ »

skywhopper wrote: post #37
_-___________-_ wrote: post #4

Hmm. I "obtained" 2^32 IPv4 addresses pretty easily; not sure if it's legitimate or not: for addr in range(2**32): print('.'.join([str(addr >> (i Edit: Well, this was unpopular. In case it's too subtle, my point is that the title is terrible.

The concept of ownership of an IP address, implied by “obtains”, is pretty clear and well-understood. The story was exactly what I imagined after reading the headline. Rather than making an obtuse joke, how would you suggest it be improved?

"obtains control of" would be much better.

consider the headline "obtained 800k email addresses illegitimately". would you really assume that this meant they were able to receive email at those addresses, or just that they'd obtained the addresses?

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#79

Post by _-___________-_ »

skywhopper wrote: post #38
_-___________-_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is quite literally what my script does :) Think about if the title said "800K email addresses obtained illegitimately", and what you would interpret the meaning of that to be.

I would expect a database of valid email addresses had been compromised. Context of what is being “obtained” matters, of course. But the sum total of valid IP addresses is a fixed, finite, and well-known value. Can you write a script to generate all valid email addresses?

I can, and it does eventually complete, but it might take a while.

Re: Prosecutors allege Micfo obtained 800k IPv4 addresses illegally

#80

Post by wut42 »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #18
wut42 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with the title. Obtained means "To get hold of; to gain possession of, to procure; to acquire, in any way".

Which is quite literally what my script does :) Think about if the title said "800K email addresses obtained illegitimately", and what you would interpret the meaning of that to be.

For emails, I would think they just got the address.

For IPs addresses, I would think they got an assignation as well, because IPs numbers without assignations are worthless.

It all depends on the context.

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