In May 2019, ARIN won an important case. The court verdict found
that a person defrauded the regional internet registry (RIR) of 735,000
addresses using 11 shelf corporations. The court ordered the perpetrator to
give back the fraudulently taken resources, and pay the RIR $350,000 in legal
charges.
IPv4 address prices are increasing because of exhausting supplies,
so this might just be the start of many more cases to come in the future.
Meanwhile, the secondary IPv4market makes opportunities for fraudsters and registered IPv4 address
brokers.
The present condition of the secondary market urges purchasers to
know the reputation of their supplier. Reputable organizations take abuse
control seriously to make the resources they lease safe. The seller has to
ensure that the supply comes from a legally valid place, plus the purchaser
should never use the resources illicitly.
The market is no isolated occurrence, but instead a sign of an
issue that is more complicated due to many reasons. AFRINIC is the lone RIR
with a pool of available IPv4 addresses. The other registries have used up the
free assets over the last 10 years, with ARIN arriving at this crucial juncture
in 2014. This means leasing such an IP address in the secondary market is the
lone way to make it available for buyers.
Like all resources with low supply and high demand, a wide variety
of illegal and legal practices are used to get and sell IPv4 addresses again.
Brokers worth their salt implement a wide range of abuse prevention procedures
to confirm that what they lease are not contributing to illegal schemes.
That said, the secondary market is scattered across numerous IPv4 brokers, plus the
industry’s requirement for a more transparent solution is not yet met. For
these reasons, a lessee has to take certain precautions when getting IPv4
address spaces from brokers.
Every person keen on leasing these resources has to look into the
third-party they are going to trust. The customer has to consider how reliable
the tools for checking the record of a particular address is. Besides that,
they also have to think about the broker’s reliability; to check this, consider
the following.
- The
length of time the broker has been operating.
- The
opinion of other clients regarding the brokerage service provider.
Fraudsters are leeching on public IPs, so buyers and sellers should put more effort into reducing the risks associated with various address abuse types.
