If your looking to transfer your domain names to Epik, you should think again. As reported through various media outlets, Epik stole millions of dollars of customers Escrow funds, and have yet to pay them back. There are also reports from Namepros.com that Epik have stolen individual domain names from client’s accounts and resold these without informing the real owners. Here’s why you shouldn’t do an Epik Domain Transfer.
Epik Stole $91,000 from Kathleen Kalaf
Kathleen Kalaf used Epik to sell her domain name Candida.com for $100,000. After 9% commission, she was due to be paid $91,000. To date, she has not been paid a cent from this sale, yet the domain name was transferred to the buyer. She recently spoke about this on YouTube.
Epik Stole $1.5 Million from DomainEmpire
DomainEmpire are a well known resellers of domain names, and they had $1.5 million sitting in their Epik account before it went missing. To date, they have not been paid back, and recently published a review on Trustpilot. Their full review can be seen here.
Here’s Luigi from DomainEmpire (no need to hide my identity) and this’s a 100% genuine and verifiable review unfortunately.
I admit we worked quite well with Rob Monster (Masterbucks/Epik CEO till last Sep 2022) for the latest years. We had 4 diff. accounts at Masterbucks where we were collecting funds generated from multiple domain sales closed through the Epik.com escrow service.
All funds were deposited to our Masterbucks balances.
No problem with withdrawals until few months ago but Rob offered us a 6% yearly interest over our deposits (paid in the measure of 0.50% at the beginning of each month) so we’ve a total balance of roughly $1.5M (yes, you’re reading correctly and we’ve screenshots to proof this).
Most of our funds have been converted in Bitcoins some months back but at the end of Ocober they’ve fraudolently (and with no previous notice) reconverted anything to USD and moved the balance of 3 of these accounts to the correspoding Epik accounts.Masterbucks.com has been ‘under maintenance’ for few weeks so they gained time to move elsewhere all their customer funds (I guess anything may have been converted to crypto but we’ll soon start a legal investigation to make light over the real facts).
Once back online, we see no real improvement made exception for a 2.5% withdrawal fee + an additional fee applied to any requested wire.
Note this was just a strategy to discourage most of their customers to withdraw funds but it didn’t work considering anyone tried to recover their own cash so they’ve just surprised us all by just ignoring such refund requests 🙂It’s all important to note withdrawals were previously free (considering they were already earning through their escrow service fee) so they added it with no previous announcement.
Before this event, we tried to withdraw $50k with no luck considering the request was cancelled few days later and all funds moved to Epik.
After that we got an email inviting us to reinvest our funds in Epik services/domain purchases with no option to withdraw them.We’ve emailed Rob multiple times trying to reach an amicable compromise before making the whole story public, this’s honestly the first time we post a negative review about someone and it’s something we don’t really like to do …
Lots of promises but nothing happened.Brian Royce (the new CEO) agreed to schedule a call with our paralegal for last Friday 11/18 after that his assistant called to reschedule to Monday 11/21 but nobody called and he disappeared by ignoring the further reminder we send him by email.
Rob Monster (previous CEO) is now chairman at Epik and here’s something fun.
If you email him now, you getting an autoresponse inviting to contact Brian for any Epik related issue but … now you know the whole story 🙂We’ve enough resources and motivations to sue this company and to make the whole story public being in the position to proof that Rob Monster deceived and frauded us despite the fact we trusted his company more than our own bank !
We’ve warned all our customers/partners and contacts to stay away from Masterbucks/Epik now becomed high risk companies near to bankruptcy.
In view of all recent facts, Epik will soon loose the Icann accreditation and all domains will be assigned to another registrar.
We’re ready to edit our review if someone from Epik will call our paralegal to clarify this matter and to refund our balance under all 4 accounts with no real intention to damage their reputation if an agreement should be reached.
Epik Stole Domain Names From Michele Dinoia
On Namepros, Michele Dinoia recently revealed that he had several domain names stolen from his Epik account, and has proof that the domains in question were pushed by the previous CEO Rob Monster to his own personal account.
Not only this, the portfolio owner of over 30,000 domain names was billed $979.40 for the renewal of domains that he doesn’t even own, and wasn’t refunded (source).
From the domain names he does own, Michele paid for the renewals for a number of .me domain names, yet the domain names were not renewed by Epik, despite being paid for. Epik then insisted on a $7470 restoration fee for the domain names in question.
Should You Do an Epik Domain Transfer?
You should not transfer your domain name to Epik. There is a chance your domain names won’t be renewed, even after paying for their renewal, and some domain names have been stolen by Epik. You should consider using an alternative registrar.
Last Updated: July 21, 2023
