Elad Cohen is the Donald Trump of the Middle East. He is a pathological liar, a con man, and a thief.
Much evidence exists to support this viewpoint, and somewhat less than all of that evidence has yet been seen by the public generally, and/or by the AFRINIC community specifically. (I am informed and believe however that current AFRINIC management is already well and truly aware of much of this additional evidence. All of it shall quite certainly be made public in due course.) Even in lieu of that additional evidence, it should already be plain and clear to all that Mr. Cohen has made, and continues to make, the most outrageous and unbelievable claims, backed up by exactly -zero- hard evidence whatsoever. He claims to have *somehow* purchased enormously vast gobs of valuable IPv4 legacy address space, from some unidentified party, while stedfastly refusing to name the party in question, or to produce a single shread of documentary evidence supporting his utterly outlandish claims. This is a game that we here in the U.S. are already quite familiar with. Critics of Mr. Trump's almost unbroken stream of ludicrous and outlandish claims, about his wealth, about the true source of his bank loans, and about numerous other of his superfically ridiculous claims have been begging Mr. Trump for over four long years now to produce his tax returns for public inspection, just as all other Presidents and presidential candidates have done here in the U.S. for that past 60+ years now. To date, those many requests have never been honored. Rather, Mr. Trump is always finding some new lame excuse for keeping his dirty little secrets secret. And those excuses change from day to day. So it is also with our Mr. Cohen. Ask him to produce even a single shred of evidence to support his claims to rightfully own several millions of dollars worth of legacy AFRINIC IPv4 address space and he evades, delays, and gives excuses. I suspect that at any moment Mr. Cohen may likewise claim to be the rightful owner of the gold fillings in my own teeth while likewise producing zero evidence to support that equally absurd claim. Furthermore, Mr. Cohen evidentally isn't even man enough to post here a copy of the legal complaint that he has allegedly filed against AFRINIC. He posts here, trying to persuade the AFRINIC community that AFRINIC management has done something wrong by simply taking back what he and his cohorts have stolen, and yet at this moment he is simultaneously pursuing a legal attack against AFRINIC, and thus also against the very same community that he is trying to persuade. It may be too obvious to even need saying, but I'll say it anyway: Mr. Cohen has a funny way of trying to gain allies for his personal financially-motivated jihad. What we *do* know about Mr. Cohen, and what there *is* hard documentary evidence to prove, is that he provided to various parties a number of clearly forged LOA documents as he was attempting to obtain routing for various parts of his stolen empire. The evidence is so clear and compelling that Mr. Cohen hasn't even bothered to try to dispute it. But then again, why would he? Anyone who spends at least two minutes looking at the documents in question can readily see the obvious, i.e. that the signatures and the "official" stamps on those documents are the results of a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste job in PhotoShop. As I have previously noted elsewhere, these forgeries are so inept and silly that no self-respecting forger would even try to use such documents, or try to pass them off as genuine. Mr. Cohen does not wish to talk about those blatantly forged documents. Nor does Mr. Cohen wish to talk about the five abandoned legacy /16 blocks in the APNIC region that I caught him red-handed squatting on last year, i.e. the 168.198.0.0/16, 139.44.0.0/16, 143.136.0.0/16, 143.253.0.0/16, and 146.51.0.0/16 blocks, the first of which being the rightful property of none other than the Australian national government. And of course, Mr. Cohen does not which to talk about his pending lawsuit against AFRINIC, nor does he wish to post here a copy of his legal filing in that case so that members of this community could know, first-hand and precisely, what he is even suing AFRINIC for. (For all anyone here knows, Mr. Cohen may be suing AFRINIC merely over some unfortunate dog bite incident.) Just like our Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen is also long on retoric and grievances and short on specifics and evidence. At the drop of a hat, and at every opportunity he bleats that he is the unfortunate and guiltless victim of some unseen secret cabal, which apparently now includes AFRINIC, all of whom are conspiring together to deter him from his mission of gathering unearned wealth unto himself, presumably so that he can ascend to his rightful place among the upper echelons of wealthy society in Israel. And as with our Mr. Trump, it is apparetly of no concern whatsoever to Mr. Cohen who he has to step on or who he has to steal from in order to pursue his hoped-for riches. I need to be clear about this. Mr. Cohen appears to bemoan the fact that AFRINIC has, at least in some instances, taken back control of -just- the WHOIS records and also, hopefully, the reverse DNS delegations for at least some of what Mr. Cohen and his various partners in crime have stolen. From where I am sitting, AFRINIC has not done this either thoughtlessly nor even terribly expeditiously. Quite the opposite in fact. I continue to be dismayed and disheartened at the glacially slow pace at which AFRINIC management has elected to remediate these self-evidently bogus and clearly fradulent entries in the data base. The unfortunate and utterly unnecessary delays that AFRINIC management has applied to what should have been some quite simple and straightforward data base corrections have allowed Mr. Cohen and his cohorts more than a full additional year of ill-gotten gains, earned on the backs of these stolen blocks, and as an additional reward for deceit and theft. (He is still profitably sub-leasing a great deal of IPv4 space in these stolen blocks to various parties, even as we speak, specifically with the aid and assistance of the Hong Hong based AS18013 and its freshly-minted made- to-order cousin, AS137951.) It has been entirely apparent for more than a year now that AFRINIC management and the AFRINIC board are all far more concerned with protecting their own asses, legally speaking, than they are in thwarting this ongoing criminal profittering or in simply doing the obviously Right Thing. The provably fradulent changes made to to the AFRINIC WHOIS data base could have been and should have been un-done the moment they first became known. Instead, management and the board have elected to take the path of least resistance, and to insist on their right and (alleged) obligation to do absolutely nothing unless and until the various and several legal representatives of the numerous long-dead companies that are the rightful owners of these legacy blocks show up on AFRINIC's doorstep to complain about these many and obviously related thefts. It is not necessary and should not be necessary for dead companies to rise from the graveyard of corporations to haunt the living into simply seeing what is obvious, plain, and right in front of their faces. Nor should it be necessary for corporate zombies to rise from the dead to motivate the living to respond to blatant thefts intelligently and promptly. AFRINIC should at long last complete its work on these matters, un-do the remaining frauds in the data base, and stop rewarding this ongoing criminal enterprise. The fact that it has so far failed to do so, even after more than a year of dawdling, will no doubt be a comfort and an inspiration to the next wave of crooks, con men, and charlatans who will in future see some hole, some new ploy, or some fresh opportunity to also and likewise defraud the slow-acting and slow-witted AFRINIC. Regards, rfg Ref: https://bgp.he.net/AS137951#_prefixes You may be forgiven for being perplexed at why an allegedly Hong Kong based ASN is routing all and only IPv4 address blocks that all have little South African national flags next to them in the above display. More significantly, you may also wonder why a great many of these blocks have little green check marks next to them, indicating an "authorized" route. The reason for this, in at least some cases, is that not only has AFRINIC management utterly failed to un-do the fradulent WHOIS data base entries that were already known about and publicly reported on LAST YEAR, but also and even worse, AFRINIC management has failed to prevent Mr. Cohen from -continuing- to make fresh fradulent entries in the AFRINIC data base, even into the current calendar year, for example, this one: route: 155.159.0.0/16 descr: Route-object origin: AS18013 mnt-by: MNT-SCS changed: info@afri.holdings 20200126 source: AFRINIC I look forward to the day, if ever, when AFRINIC will decide to stop allowing itself to be used by Mr. Cohen like a woman of the streets. To say that this lack of care is shameful would be an understatement. _______________________________________________ Community-Discuss mailing list Community-Discuss@afrinic.net https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/community-discuss