General Director of IT Company Micfo LLC Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for Fraud
Charleston, South Carolina – Amir Hellain, the 40-year-old General Director of the IT company Micfo LLC, has been sentenced to 5 years in prison for fraud using electronic communications. The sentencing comes almost 2 years after Hellain pleaded guilty to utilizing a complex network of fictitious companies to obtain over 735,000 Internet addresses from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).
In 2018, ARIN filed a lawsuit against Hellain and Micfo LLC, alleging that they fraudulently obtained hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. The dispute between ARIN and Micfo was eventually settled through arbitration, with Micfo returning most of the addresses that had not yet been sold.
The case caught the attention of federal prosecutors in South Carolina, and in May 2019, Hellain was charged with fraud using electronic communications. The prosecution claimed that Hellain created a network of fictitious companies and false identities to deceive ARIN and mask the fact that all the addresses were being purchased by a single buyer.
Prosecutors presented evidence that each of the fictitious companies had forged power of attorney documents signed by nonexistent individuals. As a result, Hellain was charged with 20 counts of fraud, one for each payment made by the fictitious companies.
Initially, Hellain contested the charges, but during the second day of the trial in November 2021, he changed his plea to guilty. The estimated value of the IP addresses obtained through the scheme ranged between $10 million and $14 million, according to the prosecutor’s office.
ARIN, in a statement, stated that the 5-year prison sentence issued by the South Carolina court serves as an “important warning to other parties contemplating fraudulent schemes to obtain or distribute Internet resources.”
Since 2013, Micfo has been flagged by Spamhaus, an organization that assists in