Revealed: who’s really running Epik
Scandal-rocked registrar Epik promised to turn over a new leaf when it got acquired last year, and now the guy in charge of the domains business — a familiar face to many– has broken cover and talked to DI about the company’s recent woes and turnaround plans.
That guy is director of domains Christopher Ambler, a thirty-year veteran of the industry, who came out of stealth mode today to talk about how he wants to kill Epik’s reputation as a refuge for far-right hate and regain the trust of its customers.
Ambler is perhaps best-known as the founder and CEO of Image Online Design, the company that offered a .web gTLD in an alt-root in the 1990s. More recently, until 2021 he also spent seven years as principal software architect at GoDaddy.
Ambler says he joined Epik’s new owner, Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in company formation services, in November 2022, with a remit to scratch-build a registrar to offer the company’s clients online presence services.
“The basic story is boring as hell,” Ambler said. “Registered Agents does business formations… the company just decided it made sense to be a registrar. They brought me on a year and a half ago with the idea to just build this thing from scratch.”
About six or seven months into this project, in June 2023, Registered Agents decided it could cut a couple of years of development time by simply acquiring the assets of an existing registrar, Ambler said, and Epik’s were up for grabs.
At the time, Epik was on the ropes, rocked by a financial mismanagement scandal under then-CEO Rob Monster that had led to registries disconnecting it for non-payment and an ICANN probe that put it at risk of losing its accreditation and going out of business.
Registered Agents paid $5 million for the registrar and set about paying off the registries and getting the ICANN accreditation transferred to the new owners, from Monster’s Epik Inc to the new Epik LLC.
Due to the nature of Registered Agents’ business — it sets up companies for people, often anonymously and not always to nice people — theories abounded, notably on the Namepros discussion forum, that the new owner was just a front for Monster.
“I totally get the whole ‘We think this is Rob Monster pulling another shady deal’ thing, and I don’t know this for a fact but if I were ICANN I would have thought that was entirely a possibility,” Ambler said. “But they went over it with a fine toothed comb and a microscope.”
Quite apart from the business mismanagement, Epik came with a tonne of reputational baggage. It had long been known as a safe haven for far-right bullies, with the likes of Gab.com, The Daily Stormer, InfoWars and Kiwi Farms among its customer base.
Ambler, who describes himself as “kind of a hippy”, culturally Jewish with spiritual leanings toward Buddhism, was not comfortable with this legacy.
While the new Epik did not publicly disassociate itself from these customers until early 2024, Ambler said the decision was made much sooner.
“When the deal was signed to buy Epik we knew on that day we were no longer the ‘free speech registrar’, we were not the right-wing registrar,” he said. “That’s what the old Epik did, I personally don’t agree with that.”
He compared the gear-shift to the day he interviewed at GoDaddy over a decade ago and made it clear he wasn’t happy working for the company if it was still running the “sexist” TV ads it was famed for in the noughties, which by then it had discontinued.
“When I was told we’re looking at buying [Epik’s] assets, the first thing I said was ‘Okay, but there is some dumpster fire involved here, we’re not going to keep that, right?’ and everybody said ‘No’,” Ambler said. “Absolutely everybody was completely on-board.”
The company then set about “politely inviting” its more controversial customers to take their business elsewhere and shutting down any customers involved in outright illegality, such as unlicensed pharmacies, publishing child sexual abuse material or hate speech that crossed the line into incitement to violence.
“I wouldn’t say it was a significant portion of the business, but it was certainly non-zero,” Ambler said. Hundreds of customers were “shown the door”, he said.
“One of things that angsts me is when you look at the online talk about Epik a lot of people still to this day think Epik is the right-wing registrar, because there’s so much stuff out there from years and years ago,” he said.
“People think Epik is the refuge of the white supremacists,” he said. “I really want to combat that message.”
Ambler said he also oversaw a security review of Epik’s code, following a major breach in 2021.
“We went nuts on security for the first couple months, just making sure everything was safe,” he said.
Was it?
“It is now,” he said.
Since the takeover, Epik has lost hundreds of thousands of domains as customers, fed up with its earlier antics and/or suspicious of the new owners, transferred to other registrars.
At its peak in August 2022, the company had 808,160 gTLD domains under management. By March 2024, the most recent month for which we have records, that number had dropped to 265,845, a loss of over half a million names.
“I daresay we’ve bottomed out at this point and actually have net positives on a number of metrics, but we kind of expected that,” Ambler said.
“Keep in mind that the peak of Epik was mostly accomplished by Rob Monster selling domains at a huge loss to create more appearance of growth,” he added. “That was his goal. He wanted to show that Epik was growing by leaps and bounds, but the company was taking losses left and right.”
Looking forward, Epik is focusing less on being the “be-all and end-all” to domain investors and more on being a solid “world class” retail registrar and selling to Registered Agents’ million-plus existing customers.
Ambler’s final messages to DI readers?
“First, we’re not the right-wing registrar, so please don’t confuse us with the old Epik,” he said, “Second, I’m terribly sorry it’s more boring than a lot of people seemed to think.”
“I’d love to get out there and tell people we’re the good guys now,” he said.
Report: Monster “misappropriated” millions from Epik
Epik former CEO Rob Monster “misappropriated” over $3.5 million from the company before his departure last year, according to a report in Wired yesterday.
In a fairly in-depth piece on the registrar’s turbulent 2023, the tech publication said it has had eyes on a forensic accounting document that made the allegations:
An accounting firm hired by Epik to conduct a forensic investigation alleged that Monster had misappropriated more than $3.5 million, according to an internal preliminary report obtained by WIRED. More than $1.5 million was attributed to Monster personally withdrawing funds from the company. Nearly $2 million of Epik funds was used in Kingdom Ventures, Monsters’ venture capital firm, according to the report.
The article does not make it clear whether any criminality is alleged and Monster did not respond to the magazine’s request for comment.
The article also shed some extra light on the takeover of the former Epik Inc registrar by Epik LLC, a new company confirmed by ICANN to be owned by a company-formation outfit in Wyoming called Registered Agents Inc and not affiliated with Monster.
Registered Agents’ lawyer Bryce Myrvang told Wired that the plan is to offer its clients domains and web hosting when they form their companies, apparently confirming that the company is in it for the synergies rather than to hide Epik’s true owner.
Myrvang also offered his apologies to anyone offended by the recent weirdness coming out of its official Twitter account, which led some to believe that Monster was still pulling the strings at the company despite the new ownership.
Epik reveals who is running the company
Epik has named the three people it says are running the company following the change of control last June.
They are: JM Spear (identified as president) Jon Garrison (treasurer) and Bryce Myrvang (secretary), according to a recently published page on the company’s web site, which also names Registered Agents Inc as the parent company.
The three men hold the same positions at Registered Agents, according to that company’s web site.
The publishing of the new officers web page follows shortly after ICANN said it would ask Epik to publish such a page last week.
It seems the press release announcing the “acquisition” of Epik by Registered Agents I blogged about yesterday pre-dates ICANN’s approval of the new Epik LLC taking over the registrar accreditation of the old Epik Inc, which followed months of vetting.
So now we know who owns and runs the new Epik, which has committed to regain the trust of customers following a financial scandal and abandon its old devotion to a hard-line “free speech” stance, at least on paper.
The fact that Registered Agents specializes in company formations makes its acquisition of a registrar somewhat plausible, but the fact that its job is often to act as a proxy for its clients’ true beneficiaries means speculation about Epik’s ownership is unlikely to relent immediately.
Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
Epik has announced that it has been acquired and has named at least one person responsible for running the troubled registrar, but the new information is unlikely to satisfy critics or quash the conspiracy theories around the company’s new management.
“Registered Agents Inc., the leading registered agent service provider in the United States, has acquired key assets of internet domain registrar Epik,” the company said in a press release this weekend.
Bryce Myrvang, in-house counsel for Registered Agents, is named in the press release, but his position at Epik is not stated. Neither is it stated when the acquisition occurred — whether it was before or after ICANN approved the transfer of disgraced Epik Inc’s accreditation to Epik LLC last week, or after.
Neither the names Registered Agents or Bryce Myrvang are new information. Myrvang had been listed in ICANN’s registrar contact database after the LLC bought the Inc last June, but that changed last month to a job title rather than a named individual.
Because Registered Agents’ entire raison d’être is anonymous company formation and management, Epik’s past and current customers naturally wondered aloud whether it was in fact just a front for company founder Rob Monster, on whose watch the registrar started to descend into financial controversy, or somebody else with an interest in keeping their name secret.
But last week Epik and ICANN simultaneously announced that ICANN had completed its due diligence on the new company and found it completely independent of its former owners and leadership.
“Epik, LLC is a recently formed entity that is completely independent of Epik, Inc., its leadership, and shareholders,” ICANN told us.
“No previous owners, including Epik Inc founder Rob Monster and late stage CEO Brian Royce, are involved in Epik LLC in any capacity, including ownership interest in the business,” Epik said.
The announcement today that Registered Agents has bought Epik LLC will do little to unmuddy these waters.
For starters, if Myrvang is indeed a lawyer at a company that prides itself on its professionalism and discretion, there’s not a chance in hell he’s in charge of Epik’s Twitter account, which went a bit crazy last month.
There are undoubtedly synergies between a firm that deals in anonymous company formations — reportedly sometimes for dodgy clients — and a registrar that specialized in controversial anchor tenants.
But Epik is now confirming that it’s done a full U-turn on its strategy to court and welcome some of the web’s most distasteful sites and is now positioning itself as a regular workaday registrar with a focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs.
“Since the acquisition, and throughout the ICANN accreditation transfer review, Epik updated its terms of service and worked aggressively to rid its platform of violators. Having removed a handful of problematic clients, Epik can focus on rebuilding trust with its small business and entrepreneurial clients,” the company said in its latest press release.
Epik lost hundreds of thousands of domains under management last year, after a financial mismanagement scandal caused customers to lose confidence and flee in droves.
Mystery buyer rescues Epik at end of crazy week
Limping registrar Epik isn’t out of the woods yet by a long shot, but its life became considerably easier late last week when a mystery buyer snapped up its assets for almost $5 million, enabling it to pay off many of its creditors.
The company said on Twitter that it had closed a deal that allowed it to pay off ICANN, which had filed a public breach notice just two days earlier, as well as various registries and loan providers.
It also allowed it to pay off Matthew Adkisson, the customer who was owed over $300,000 following a botched secondary market domain deal last year, who has now dropped his fraud and racketeering lawsuit.
Adkisson appears to have come away poorer, however, as the payoff seems to have only covered the money owed and not the probably substantial legal fees he has incurred since then.
The events of last week were pretty wild, including claims about literal assassination attempts, judging by court documents from Adkisson’s case.
Epik had told his lawyers that an “asset purchase agreement” for the Epik registrar was imminent, which would allow the company to settle its debts.
Disappointed with the offer, Adkisson filed for a temporary restraining order to prevent the sale, believing the money would wind up being squirreled away by the registrar’s current or former management.
That TRO disappeared when he withdrew his complaint and got paid at the weekend. ICANN, Identity Digital and Verisign all appear to have been paid at the same time, along with creditors called TVT and JJE.
The ICANN breach notice provides some poor optics for ICANN, which now looks like it only initiated Compliance proceedings in March, when its own registrar fees went unpaid, despite being aware of the many customer complaints against Epik.
However, now that the Compliance process has started, getting paid may not be enough to end it. The breach notice also refers to “several hundred” domains that were affected by Epik’s cash flow problems — it seems the company was unable to renew or transfer domains while in was in hock to the registries.
Adkisson’s docket contains several sworn declarations from customers saying they have lost important domains to others or been forced to spend thousands of dollars to move their domains elsewhere lest risk losing them.
While Epik cannot provide satisfactory answers to ICANN’s questions about these domains, its accreditation is still at risk.
Complicating matters, the new buyer will need to have the old registrar accreditation transferred to it, a process that takes time and subjects the registrar to a certain amount of ICANN scrutiny.
And the identity of the buyer is pretty mysterious.
On paper, the buyer is Epik LLC, a Wyoming corporation that formed about a week before the deal was finalized. Former Epik CEO Rob Monster has had to agree to change the names of operating company Epik Inc and parent Epik Holdings Inc to remove the “Epik” brand.
But the new LLC was created by a company called Registered Agents Inc, and the acquisition deal signed by its president, Jon Spear.
Registered Agents is a company that enables people to set up shell companies pretty much anonymously, and is often used by “[o]ligarchs, criminals and online scammers”, according to the Washington Post.
This is exactly the kind of association Epik does not need right now.
Making the new owners look even worse, an anonymous individual claiming to be a representative of the new Epik introduced himself or herself on the domainers forum Namepros at the weekend in probably the dumbest way imaginable if the company wants to claw back any credibility at all among what was once a core customer base.
The post does contain an apology to those “financially hurt” by Epik’s actions, and a commitment to “make things right for as many people as possible”, but it also contains several sideswipes at Namepros users, many of them victims of Epik’s mismanagement, calling their commentary “worthless”. It looks like the work of a troll.
In short, Epik still has a hell of a tough time ahead of it if it wants to shake off its bad reputation.
But before this article ends, I promised you some stuff about assassination attempts.
The material disclosed in the Adkisson case includes what appears to be a dense, multi-layered, rambling, paranoid conspiracy theory from Rob Monster, which draws in everyone from disgraced shock jock Alex Jones to Domain Name Wire editor Andrew Allemann (who hilariously Monster accuses of writing “hit pieces” about him).
I have to confess to being slightly disappointed that I didn’t get a shout-out.
He accuses people I’m not going to name here as secretly convening in late 2021 to discuss removing Monster from Epik by any means possible, with “lethal options” possibly on the table. He goes on to say:
For the record, I do have reason to believe that there have been attempts on my life including recently. This was the main reason why I stayed in Asia from January 20 through April 4 and maintained a heightened degree of privacy. I am in excellent health and not suicidal.
Monster, who I believe UK defamation law allows me to describe as “a bit of a character”, is known to frequently indulge in conspiracy theories, particularly with regards mass shootings (which feature in the theory outlined in his email to Adkisson’s lawyers).
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