The US Department of Justice has reportedly charged Amir Golestan – a 36-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, USA – with a 20-count indictment for his fraudulent activities in illegally obtaining 750,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

According to the announcement on the DoJ official website, starting from February 2014, Golestan has established a series of shell businesses under the name of “Channel Partners”. All of these firms have been licensed to access IP addresses by the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN), which enables the hijacker to take control of them.

In addition to utilizing his companies, Golestan formed a number of deceptive websites, false schemes and crafted fake credentials to trick the ARIN into giving him the IP addresses, as they can be requested for business-related reasons. Golestan then placed these IP addresses on the market for illegal transactions, with a total estimated value false between $9,850,880.00 and $14,397,440.00.

Golestan was even planning to press charges against the ARIN when he evoked his fifth-amendment rights, as he believed his plans were concrete enough to pull the scam off. ARIN has regained control of the IP addresses and Golestan will go into court this week.

Numerous comments have been made following the incident, about the actual security capability of ARIN, as well as whether such a centralized registry system is an exploitable weak point in the Internet infrastructure.

A few argued that blockchain can provide a solution to the issue, with its decentralized feature that can stop any individual from taking over the IP address distributing process, as well as provide transparency for record keeping and owner tracking.

Earlier this month, DoJ has reportedly accused a group of hackers called “The Community” of 15 criminal counts, regarding their act of stealing digital currency via SIM swapping.