[anti-abuse-wg] Notice: Fradulent RIPE ASNs

In message <862A73D42343AE49B2FC3C32FDDFE91C0940BB25 at e2010-mbx-c1n2.exchange201
0.nl>, Erik Bais <erik at bais.name> wrote:

>Hi Ronald,
>
>> Has _any_ person who has _ever_ reported any kind of fraud or "abuse"
>> to RIPE NCC _ever_ seriously desired _any_ anonymity and/or confidentialt
>y in connection with any such report?
>
>> I rather doubt it.
>
>> The people who need to hide in the shadows are the abusers... not the pub
>lic spirited samaritans who merely report their skulduggery.  Speaking for 
>myself, I can assure you that _I_ don't feel any need to hide.
>
>There could be very good reasons not to put a target on themselves.
>
>Especially with certain crime, like running Botnets for hire or selling onl
>ine pharmacy pills in huge quantities, those involve a lot of cash and mafi
>a type practices are very likely, it is far better to be able to be able to
> report information without your name having published publicly.

Yes, I probably should have realized that someone would raise that argument.

I reluctantly must grant that you are correct, and that it is theoretically
possible that someone desires to make a report but desires to remain
anonymous.

The solution could be a checkbox on the form, or to simply make those
fields of the reporting form in which one could enter personal identity
information optional.

The harder problem is the one that I was trying to raise, and that I
think crys out far more for a solution, i.e. the fact that once some
resource allocation funny business is reported to RIPE (or to ARIN
for that matter) that's the last that anybody ever hears of it.  As
I've tried to point out, I think that this is distinctly counter-
productive, both because is discourages everybody from making any
such reports in the future and also because it absolutely minimizes
the disincentive for both the current perp and future perps to try
again to defaud RIPE.


Regards,
rfg