Epik wrap-up and cast of characters review:
Moving on to more important things in the world
Rob Monster: A deeply disturbed and sick man.
He deceived countless people all over the world about Epik being the Fort Knox of domain and web hosting and used his cheesy "Christian" and freeze peach schtick to sell it for profit and ego but he not only didn't even own his own website, he had never even seen the code. Imagine being a Christian or thought criminal in a foreign tyrannical nation and hearing this man. I'm sure they would say, no one would talk like this unless they were really a Christian and he has millions of dollars, surely he must be sincere. Then all their personal information is leaked online for the world to see and they discover the truth when they and their families are locked up or worse.
He racked up around $5-6M in an upside down ponzi (Masterbucks) scheme and stole domains from people he called friends, even planning vacations with them while stealing their domains. From my calculations Monster still has around $5M in hiding, probably crypto.
Instead of confessing his crimes and apologizing and making it right he threatened people with lawsuits if they mentioned. Truly evil man who will never repent.
There is only one reason this man was not brought to justice for his crimes and and all the people he hurt and that is because he was used to hurt more Christians and thought criminals than he already had by federal agents.
JJE/Palmetto State Armory - Jamin McCallum and Julian Wilson: Investors
Nice guys and probably mostly meant well but hurt a lot of people with terrible investment and not believing how wrong they were until it was too late.
They gave Epik a pre-money valuation of $144M and bought 20% (turns out they were off by about $150M in their valuation calculations) Perhaps the worst investment in the history of investing. 2 tranches of $16M, first one paid in full. $4M of that money was to be used to purchase infrastructure and build a social network called Bravoxx with Justin Tabb, Epik employee/contractor who later became CTO at JJE, running the project. Tabb failed to meet deadlines, which is odd since he was basically just re-skinning Node-BB but he is a career tech scammer. JJE later pulled the plug on this project.
JJE discovered that Monster had spent much of their money to pay back personal debts, remodel his house ($2M), buy personal crypto and purchase Substratum and Amplifii for $2M from Tabb. Both of those turned out to be scam projects and just front end skins powered by others' software. Justin tabb and/or Monster also stole over $1.5M in holdings of the fake crypto exchange, Amplfii, that promised no transfer fees.
After the hack they demanded to see the Epik books and Monster went silent. After threats of lawsuits and criminal prosecution they all agreed to a JJE exit and settled on the amount, set up with an initial payment of $2M and installment payments for the remainder. Monster refinanced his wife's house and made payment but of course never made an installment payment. After many months of non payment they renegotiated and agreed to install Brian Royce.
Imagine getting handed $16M and knowing perfectly well you scammed some billionaires and don't even own your own website and not trying to build or buy to cover your tracks...insane! He just doubled down and went after more suckers with a post-money valuation of $300M. That's some chutzpah. If he had been smarter and not so greedy he could have avoided the hack and probably got that second tranche of $16M. Honestly, better this outcome then letting him run a muck with his scams with more money behind him. He is a psychopath that only thinks in terms of scamming others with no concern for who he hurts and with more money he would have been able to hurt more people. Imagine a world with Monster, Tabb and Royce running a bottle neck for free speech? Thank you Lord for delivering us all.
In my opinion JJE's handling of the whole situation stemmed from their lack of acceptance of just how far off their valuation was. If not $144M, surely $50M, nope. Then maybe $25M, nope. $10M?, nope. More like negative -$5M. Epik ran on loss selling domains to jack their numbers to hook a fish like JJE and didn't even own their own website. It sold for $5M after getting $16M investment, most of which was debt. The only thing of real value was the hosting company Monster purchased post money. In fairness, even I, who hated Monster within minutes of speaking with him didn't imagine he had a $6M ponzi scam and didn't even own his own website.
They failed to understand that looting and letting Epik fail and keeping their investment was Monster's plan B if he couldn't double down and scam someone else. In their minds it was worth at least $25M and Monster wouldn't just bail which is why they still thought that by bringing in someone new could account for spending and save Epik. That only made things worse.
They ended up losing around $8-10M. By far the biggest victims of Monster.
Justin Tabb: Career tech scammer now serving weekends in prison for tax fraud.
He ended up walking away with something like $3.5M plus the money he was paid by JJE for pretending to develop Bravoxx. Infuriating that this guy walks away with so much money and others, who did nothing wrong still holding bags. The minimum sentencing for his crimes were 3 years but the case was sealed at the last minute and only given weekends for a year. Probably also turned into a CI to hurt thought criminals and allowed to keep his booty. No justice in this world. The wicked prosper and good suffer.
Hack: The Rosetta Stone of the Right
After much investigating my best guess is that the feds just used their usual suspects Kirtaner (Aubrey Cottle) and probably Weev (Andrew Auernheimer) a contractor for Peter Thiel. Both of which have been arrested and used for many years to run such ops. They don't actually hack anything but work as fronts for real hackers. The goal was just to obtain all the data and dump on web so they could use it as evidence to prosecute thought criminals after the Jan 6th protests. In the case of Epik the hack was so extensive that they probably had server access granted to them. Wouldn't be hard, and probably much cheaper to bribe one of the UA or RU devs to open server -- Weev lives in Moldova, last I heard, which is public info he has published.
Brian Royce:
Nice guy on phone, as most people are, and was actually relatively forthcoming but then went on to transfer millions of Epik debt onto the backs of innocent customers, stole domains and kept escrow payments. He was promised something like 20-30% of Epik if he could save it. I gently tried to tell him that Epik was not worth saving and was a curse for "free speech" efforts, as all bottle neck toll bridge grifts are but he was a desperate guy with no money, a couple of wives and a bunch of kids, and expensive car payments so he decided to make Epik customers' money into his own personal piggy bank to save his stake, later offering his victims a 95% loss to cash out. He also did all he could to silence complaints of his thieving, which was even more disgraceful and not exactly a good look for a "free speech" platform. Desperate people do all sorts of terrible things but the real test is doing right even when you are desperate. He failed biggly.
He probably knew future buyers in some way since the first thing he did as acting CEO was transfer Masterbucks to the LLC company that later purchased Epik. He apparently knows a lot of wealthy people and sold himself as a "fund raiser" on previous jobs.
New Owners: LLC Company
As far as I know they haven't done anything wrong, except defending Monster, which was very cringe, but very short lived...lol. They were probably kicking tires on Epik from the start of Royce's reign but weren't interested in purchasing a falling knife so waited until the price was right. They also paid one of the victims they felt particularly sorry for something like $30K, which they didn't have to do and was very kind.
Also, and most importantly for me, thankfully they are just trying to run an LLC company with domain and web hosting and not some freeze peach grift from behind a curtain.
In Conclusion:
The internets are full of crazy people with a personal ax to grind so no sense opening people up to attacks and feeling responsible for the actions of nutters. That is why I find doxxing so despicable and Monster's selfishness so disgraceful. Free speech is all America has that sets us apart from others and anonymity and privacy are crucial for that, as well full transparency and accountability of ownership of such platforms.
Monster is ultimately responsible for all the people hurt by this whole situation and I hope every person eventually gets the justice they deserve and these most wretched type of grifters pay.
P.S. Thanks namepros for letting use your platform as a public dead drop throughout.
