I think it was obvous a lot of his motivation to help was self-serving, twas hard to hide with all his promotion within, just noting he received an A for effort at times stepping in for domainers when no other outlet seemed available. Re: Assisting with Pheenix domains come to mind. (but also, no better marketing than being the gentleman to help an old lady cross the street) #HeroStatus #WithGreatPowerComesGreatResponsibility
That's the strange part. In the Halloween Domain social some folks claim to still be in contact with Rob Monster. And Rob is still the chairman, so not sure what/if any scapegoating beyond potential chapter 9 would be an accessible remedy for worst case scenarios. Bankruptcy and outstanding judgements is one theory, I find some of the judgments/lawsuits found in this thread interesting, but I can't make much sense of it all, hoping a well written tldr comes out.
Brainstorming Epik has made headlines, and presumably enemies. It doesn't seem to unrealistic for the way the were marketing masterbucks/escrow, that simalarily to how the data breach revealed active federal investigations against epik customers and data was marked do not delete accordingly, it doesn't seem unreasonable that some serious KYC stuff went down, and may epik may be subject themselves, or active informants to existing investigations. It's real easy to get conspiratorial when it comes to epik, and as such hard to fully comprehend where the limits actually are.
It would be nice if we could get the record straight on why payouts aren't happening. Is there a legal order relating to the KYC stuff, is it what has been speculated earlier in this thread re: cancelled investors, or any sort of substantial information assuring customers that their domains are still safe at epik, and that payments will resumes as soon as (insert exact reasoning/timeline here).
If push really came to shove, and Rob needed a way out I have to imagine he could either sell equity (in exchange for masterbucks? lol), or spill some fringe domain secrets and sell the movie rights to whatever crazy narrative is occuring behind the scenes at epik. I mean, they are the registrar for Gab, Parler, InfoWars, TexasGOP(Hacked) and many more, along with seemingly blitzing and incubating a hub for online dumpster fires, and amassing fringe customers to hide themselves, or attempt to hide their online idenities and/or misinformation amongst a sea of domainers... I mean... I'm not sure if we'd ever get a straight story but it sure seems there's a netflix worthy story to be told, somewhere in there. The same goes for any registrar really, to include GoDaddy, and specifically wondering what type of subpoena's or investigations domain registrars have been a party to throughout this last few decades of world wide web growth, all the while trying to balance verisign credits, and company growth.
Anyways (sorry for the long posts) I hope I'm not distracting too much away from the current topic. I'm looking forward to reading more from affected customers, and seeing how this all unfolds.