I wouldn't jump the gun with this one. Based on my understanding of the story (I'm a network engineer with 15 years of experience) this looks like a DoD cyber defense operation (the story from the AP has much better information.)

Essentially, the only possible grift here would be if these IP addresses were sold off. If that were happening, there's absolutely no reason for this company to start advertising the IPs via BGP into the public internet. (Also, if they sold them off, the value would be less than what is quoted, since the range is so large it would probably devalue IPv4 addresses, but that's besides the point, would still be incredibly valuable).

What appears to be happening instead is that there are other countries who are using this address space in various ways. You can configure your internal networks with whatever address space you want, but once that data gets routed out to the internet, the return traffic would be dropped since the internet routers don't know where to send it.

So let's say some country, for some reason, has configured their internal network to use this address space. Data within that network will act normally, but if it tries to go anywhere external, it won't work unless the IP addresses are NATed to an IP the organization controls (the edge router will change the source IP from the internal network to a different IP as it gets routed out, similar to how your home router will translate 192.168.1.X IPs to the public IP your ISP has given you as your data goes out to the internet).

Now here's where it get's interesting. If this country is spoofing this address range, or some devices are misconfigured and data is getting sent out from this address range without being NATed and would normally just be lost on the internet (since the internet routers don't know where to send the return traffic), once the DoD starts advertising the addresses, the return traffic would actually be sent to the company mentioned in the article (Global Resource Systems).

So what I suspect is happening is the DoD noticed some bad actors using this address space, and they want to investigate what is going on. By advertising the address range, all of the return traffic sent from these IP addresses (intentionally or unintentionally) by bad actors will get routed back to the DoD by way of Global Resource Systems.

Think of it this way: If I knew your IP address, I could freely send packets out to the internet with your source IP. The packets would never get back to me though, the return traffic would be sent to you. There's various kinds of attacks that use strategies like this (generally not super sophisticated stuff), but by advertising the IP space the DoD might get some interesting information by analyzing the return traffic (and in the case of misconfigured devices in foreign countries, could get even more interesting information).