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In April of last year, ICANN says it continued to receive complaints about RegisterFly. Customers reported being locked out of their accounts and having domain names disappearing from their accounts. Kevin Medina, says ICANN, responded by saying the issues were as a result of "growing pains."
In May 2006 the complaints started to include reports of "stolen" registrations and renewals. On the 19th of May ICANN says it received a complaint from an owner of 220 domain names whom, after a heated argument with RegisterFly, noted the Whois information for his 220 names was changed to reflect "Kevin Medina" as the registrant instead of the domains' owner. It took several weeks for RegisterFly to address this issue with ICANN, culminating at a meeting between ICANN staff, Medina, and RegisterFly's Glenn Stansbury, where the "inordinate number of complaints ICANN had received regarding RegisterFly" were "discussed." Medina and Stansbury both assured ICANN that "RegisterFly was working hard to improve its customer service." And ICANN let it go at that.
During this "discussion" Medina and Stansbury dropped another bombshell: employees in the Risk/Fraud department were being paid "strictly on commission." However ICANN did not sanction them, nor take action to terminate their accreditation. ICANN simply took their word that the policy was changed "as a result of RegisterFly's discussions with ICANN."
By early December 2006 ICANN says it was still receiving "ever-increasing complaints from RegisterFly customers about over-charging," but ICANN still did not act. At a meeting on December 3rd 2006, ICANN met with Stansbury and Mark Klein, the company's Vice President of Sales, who had only joined the company weeks earlier, to discuss the high volume of complaints which included issues surrounding RegisterFly's failure to renew customers domain names, failure of the support systems, billing errors, insufficient funding of registry accounts, and nonpayment of ICANN invoices.
ICANN says Stansbury and Klein repeated more empty promises that the problems were being corrected, and that the registrar was opening a new customer service facility within a week. ICANN's concerns were detailed in a document handed to the RegisterFly executives at the meeting. Stansbury promised to respond in writing within one month (January 3, 2007), even though RegisterFly's contact with ICANN calls for breach in 15 days. ICANN never received a response, and did nothing about the failure to respond. In January 2007, ICANN continued to receive complaints from RegisterFly customers, but complaints were also coming in from other ICANN-accredited registrars, ICANN board members, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Deeply disturbing was the fact that the most common complaint by RegisterFly customers was that transactions that were billed and paid for were not being effected at the registry. "In addition, multiple-year renewals and registrations were only being processed for one year instead of the number of years that had been paid for [sic]."
With Naruszewicz and Medina heavily engaged in a bitter dispute, the company was not registering or renewing names, but was continuing to milk the unsuspecting public, it was still trading, even with serious allegations of fraud, misrepresentation, misleading conduct, and theft, afoot; and control of the company's Web site and administration constantly changing amid claims (by both sides) of hijackings and sabotage. Since eNom has authorized RegisterFly to act as its agent, eNom is obligated under it's contract to honor the registrations which RegisterFly has made. Instead eNom is now billing the registrants additional fees to get their domain names renewed or removed from the delete pending status. ENom is now making an extra profit of the failings of its agent RegisterFly, and ICANN has done nothing to step in and require eNom to protect those it had registered through RegisterFly while RegisterFly was acting as a reseller of eNom products.
There is a slim hope that there may be concerted action by the domain names industry involving ICANN and some of the leading accredited-registrars. Action could include making application for a court order for authorization codes to be released to customers so transfers can take place; ICANN extending expiration dates of names under RegisterFly's control for up to a period of say six months from now (as a first step) to ensure no more names are lost - using alternative registrars to divide take over blocks of domain names, acting as interim registrars, at minimum temporarily, but ICANN has refused to fight for action in court despite its repeated threats - which have been systematically ignored.
For many so many the only recourse left is a class action law suit to try to protect the domain names they properly purchased.
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