Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now.

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

This kind of story makes me wonder what's the most popular/valuable domain I can take control of simply by being convincing over the phone. Sounds tempting!

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!

I moved from Namecheap 2 years ago when I had auto renew on but it did not auto-renew, which their system automatically turns your domain into an advertisement hell page. Transfer system was locked and I contacted them and told them to transfer it to my other registrar or I would file an ICANN complaint. I moved it to my main registrar (Hover) which while more expensive I haven't a problem with them in the decades I've been with them. My original registrar shutdown sometime in the mid 2000s and Hover picked up my domains, so I'm all in over there now.

I've been a long, long term customer of Namecheap as well.

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.

Well, they didn't call it NameCompetent, did they?

Yep, never own a domain with NameCheap.

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.

I've had the exact same issue with a small local registrar.

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.

Just a few weeks ago I moved from Namecheap to Porkbun. That's not an advertisement - I simply Googled popular registrars. But it is an indictment of Namecheap. They are going the way of GoDaddy. Please move away from them immediately. They are shifting to short-term strategies (high prices, immoral data practices, etc).

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.