not responding to John's posting above
He's not going to, because it's really difficult to argue with objectively verifiable facts.
When someone wants to hide the truth, there is a problem, and it is the same sort of runaround that one finds when looking under the hood of anything related to Epik.
So, to be clear... When Rob Monster was interested in providing some kind of "domain insurance", he mentioned that he would need a license to sell insurance through DNProtect
https://www.namepros.com/threads/wh...for-dnprotect-com.1156889/page-3#post-7454960
As we engage re-insurance partners and secure the requisite insurance licensing, e.g. through an acquisition of an existing insurance agency, we are spending a lot of time on risk mitigation strategy.
But he didn't do that, and went ahead and advertised that DNProtect.com, an Epik service, was selling insurance anyway.
Concerned that Epik was started yet another unlicensed financial service, I contacted the Washington State Office of Insurance Commissioner and suggested they might want to have a look into the DNProtect "domain risk solution", "warranty", "ownership protection" and other phrases they used in order to try to dance around using the word "insurance" (apparently ignorant of the fact that a warranty is a form of insurance, among other things).
Subsequent to that investigation, the site was re-configured and this appeared:
Now, just as a general safety tip, when a business says it does not provide services to people in the place where that business is operated, that's something of a warning sign. This is where things get really weird, since the site says right on the front page they can't provide services in Washington, but then if you look at the terms of service:
Leaving aside who those "associates" might be and why you might get into a dispute with them, the site says "DNProtect LLC" on it. It is, or was, an LLC, not a partnership, according to the site.
And where might you find this LLC if you did have a problem? According to the DNProtect website, their address is:
But if you look at the corporate registration record, that's simply the address of the corporate filing service which was used to form the LLC. You'll also notice that since the corporate agent wasn't being paid either - a recurring theme - then the agent resigned and does not receive correspondence on behalf of DNProtect at that address:
So, look, I don't know if DNProtect is still purporting to sell insurance or not. Hopefully not, because it was a terrible idea to proceed as if they were selling insurance without "the requisite insurance licensing" - which Rob Monster himself admitted they needed to have before the thing was even launched.
There's also nothing wrong with Bill wanting to chase down stolen domain names in exchange for a share of the resale value when the domain name is recovered. But a simple truth is that people deserve to know with whom they are doing business, and I would bet that if any of the names recovered on that basis actually do sell, then there is going to be no end of problems - not the least of which is the fact that Epik is apparently insolvent and isn't going to pay the domain owner or Bill Hartzer for that matter. Rob's unusual approach to "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too" as shown in the BC30 .com nonsense where he took possession of a customer's domain name and then put up a weird fight when they tried to get it back; his claiming to be the registrant of various customer domains in UDRP's; and the bizarre situation in which he landed with the "My Pillow" people and the Vocl domain; don't bode well for stolen domain names being held at Epik either in some sort of "partnership" with Rob, or by a defunct Wyoming mailbox LLC.
Bill's best move would simply be to get a divorce from Rob, stop the shenanigans, re-brand and take the scoring and domain recovery business as far away from that pit of madness as he can - and be honest about it.
