It would be nice to have a nonprofit registrar so jumping every few years isn't necessary.

Edit: Apparently they were bought by private equity just weeks before I noticed something was wrong. Not a coincidence, I'm sure. We need to legally destroy private equity takeovers. They are pure evil and nothing but a negative force, at least in the USA.

I can't even log in to most web sites anymore without doing a side-trip to my E-mail inbox, "for enhanced security," but these clowns let you just take a domain by asking nicely!

Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.

The poster didn't indicate if they had this feature enabled or not for the domain. It would have prevented the college club person from even seeing their email address to initiate a password reset.

This clearly isn't an answer for NC's customer support personnel and company policies.

But I've been a happy customer for many years and I discourage others from immediately reading other comments and rushing to jump to other registrars without doing your due dilligence.

Remember that in any situation, the people most likely to leave negative comments and reviews are the people that have had genuine bad experiences or feel like they've been slighted, even if unwarranted.

Had an account where I managed multiple clients. One of the clients had their "IT guy" contact the registrar for a DNS change. The registrar promptly gave the guy full access to my account, changing the password and locking me out in the process.

As soon as I regained access I moved everything off there.

My experience was kind of opposite, but still bad nonetheless. I lost domains I had with them simply because I lost the phone I used for 2FA. After several calls to them, they requested some info. I supplied all they wanted, but it took them more than a year to get back to me, by which time I had lost all interest in maintaining domains with them.

Luckily these were not critical domains; I had bought them in anticipation of building a business on them.

I am moving my domains to CloudFlare.

But then when one attempts to pay for a domain, after one has already provided all of one's credit card information to Namecheap ... Namecheap up and refers its customers to something called Link, which forces Namecheap's customers to create an account and become Link's customers - providing all that confidential credit card information, all over - leaving the customer wondering why Namecheap collected it and what they are going to do with it.

Link forces you to authenticate via SMS so that they know where you are.

This all happened less than 24 hours ago and I was already getting ready to put domain service shopping on my list of things to do but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.

I nominate Paul Vixie as a possible candidate for CTO or even CEO of a hypothetical nonprofit DNS domain service.

More info: uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy

Previous discussion from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638028

Something about a bounty, the original source is down.

It may not be some Mitnick level impersonation of a Senior VP on vacation needing an urgent change kinda trick but the point of S.E. was that it played on the human element and namely cooperation of same.

How it was obtained was not strictly defined AFAIK.

The call center employee making third world minimum wage doesn’t give a shit who the real owner of the domain is. They want to end the call quickly and get 5 stars from the customer on the feedback form.

I have made it a point to move off services that force SMS-based 2fa for this exact reason. Recently even changed banks because of this.

Was your domain in 'locked' status, preventing transfers etc?

> September 2025, CVC Capital Partners acquired a majority stake in Namecheap for an undisclosed amount, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.[3][4] Kirkendall stepped down as CEO on December 16, 2025

But prior to this they have had many incidents. Switched all domains to porkbun a few years ago

tl;dr: Namecheap configured Domain Privacy on my domain, which isn't allowed by my Registry (.in), and then suspended my domain coz the whois info was redacted.

I know a few other people that were impacted.

It can be called social engineering, however one can also put it in category of account recovery by verifying content control on the domain.

The part where it gets hairy is if your credit card was associated with the account, thats probably a recipe for disaster?

I kept a couple of domains on them for a while simply because their prices for some exotic TLD's were significantly lower than my previous go-to of Hover, but now Porkbun's got them beat on everything I use, anyway, so I'd transferred the last of them out over the past year or so.

They locked my account so I couldn't log in. To be clear, my whois information was fullly legally compliant, and I was happy to also update my namecheap profile, but when I sent them an email they didn't get back to with an response email until there was just an hour left.

Things had been going down hill slowly and lots of my peers have already moved on to porkbun, etc, but I think now things are going downhill quite fast. I did manage to save my account (and so domains) but now I will be moving to a new registrar.

And the legitimate leadership of the college-affiliated club was able to prove to NameCheap that they had a right to the domain name, as it was (not a right to your account, but a right to their club's name on the Internet). And NameCheap cooperated in turning over control to those with legitimate rights to it, rather than whoever's credit card was on the last payment?

Am I in the ballpark here so far? Perhaps NameCheap did have ways of knowing who the rightful owner was, and who you are not--especially if it was a personal account, not a "college affiliated" or "faculty" account!

In your headline, you call the club leadership "an unverified third party" but the college, and the club, and its leadership are, in fact, a first party to this domain and its transactions, while you are the third party, and you also have no idea what verification steps were taken by NameCheap on behalf of the rightful owners, the college, the leadership, or their personal identities. You have no idea about what they did with that.

It's not your domain, and you're complaining about losing something that was never yours to begin with. So you helped pay for it. That was a mistake. The way you pay for club assets: your club has a treasurer, and your club has a "purse" or club account, and your club writes the checks. You wanna pay for something, make a donation to your club and/or college.

Thankfully, it looks like the mistakes have now been rectified.

In the meantime, been with NameCheap for I don't recall how long with no issues whatsoever.