Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

Posted by Thrashed 1 day ago

Counter470Comment174OpenOriginal

I’ve been a NameCheap customer for 13 years. I’ve also helped out an old college club paying for a .com they use (that is registered to me under my name, address, and phone number). During a recent leadership transition, the incoming club lead wanted to make changes to the DNS and didn’t know to contact me. They figured out the domain name was parked at NameCheap, so they initiated a password reset using the domain name. I got a password reset email and immediately filed a NameCheap support ticket saying “I did not initiate this”. They called me to verify I was the one who filed the ticket, and then followed up with a canned email with tips like check your anti-virus.

The incoming club leader was persistent though, and called NameCheap support. He convinced them the domain registered in my name and address really belonged to his club, and with no verification or validation whatsoever, NameCheap changed my password, and changed the email address associated with my account. All because someone simply asked nicely on a phone call.

Meanwhile in the background, someone advised the new club leader who I was and we were able to connect and get things transferred over. Ultimately I was happy to give them access or even ownership if they wanted (student club turnover being what it is, it’s likely a domain doesn’t get renewed and gets gobbled up by a squatter, which is why I was keeping it current for them).

But NameCheap had no way of knowing any of this. As far as NameCheap was aware, this was a personal account of mine. They demonstrated they were perfectly able to pick up a phone and call me (to verify my initial support ticket) but when someone calls them and says “but I really want access to that account” they don’t bother?

I’d hesitate to even call this social engineering. It’s clearly a massive vulnerability. I’ve already moved a dozen of my most critical domains out of NameCheap after seeing just how easy it is for a third party to completely take over a NameCheap account: just ask nicely.

Comments

Comment by pilingual 1 day ago

Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now.

It would be nice to have a nonprofit registrar so jumping every few years isn't necessary.

Comment by davnicwil 1 day ago

I heard some advice recently, I think in an article here on HN, to just use a big company registry where it's not their profit center, indeed may even be netural to loss making, to drive other business.

This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).

If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.

Comment by jasongill 1 day ago

The only problem with this is that having such a complex function as a non-core business unit makes it ripe to get rid of, or try to find a way to make it a profit center.

Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.

Google got tired of being in the business and sold it to Squarespace.

Being a domain registrar is a total PITA and is not for the faint of heart, so it's the sort of thing that any business that takes it on as a non-core function will eventually tire of.

Comment by duskwuff 1 day ago

> Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.

Cloudflare never offered that ability. From the time they started offering domain registrations, it was always with the caveat that the nameservers would be fixed to Cloudflare's.

Comment by jasongill 1 day ago

Correct, I guess I should have clarified that I mean they removed the ability that most registrars have, in an attempt to make domains into a revenue driver for their primary product.

Comment by jurgenburgen 20 hours ago

Remove implies they previously offered it. I would say they just offer a more opinionated product.

Comment by ccamrobertson 1 day ago

As someone still smarting from the loss of Google Domains, I would consider this advice carefully.

When domains are not the profit center the company might just arbitrarily turn them off as a feature.

Comment by crossroadsguy 23 hours ago

I think a middle ground could be to use a great "domain registrar" and be prepared to move to another one when the last one stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great. And so on. Luckily this doesn't happen every month, or every year.

Comment by danaris 20 hours ago

The problem with that is, there's not necessarily a signal for "stopped being great or sold to someone not so very great" besides "they gave my domain away to a scammer because they asked."

Comment by crossroadsguy 16 hours ago

There ares some. Their reaction to events, their ownership structure change, support culture change etc etc. There isn't a perfect way to find that out, but there are indications.

Comment by apothegm 15 hours ago

Most of us don’t interact with our registrars often enough to notice changes in support culture, and who has time to be constantly checking for changes in their ownership, if that information is even available? If you’re spending that much energy on your registrar and your work isn’t as a domain trader, something’s wrong.

Comment by ajb 1 day ago

The problem is that they also need to be big enough not to be rolled by aggressive behaviour such as lawsuits, pressure from politicians, etc. I mean, some of my domains are at a tiny company run by geeks, but I wouldn't really blame them for caving if someone really put the heat on them.

There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.

Comment by crossroadsguy 23 hours ago

The day Namecheap started terminating services for existing customers from Russia was the day I realised that service can't be relied upon at all and had initiated my domain transfer the very next day to another registrar I was using.

Comment by AussieWog93 1 day ago

I've been with VentraIP in Australia for a decade now.

They're not necessarily better or worse than any other provider (I'm assuming support is good and local but I've never needed it), but they're based in Melbourne - so if push comes to shove I can physically go over there and speak with them directly.

Same thing with my payment provider, after a Stripe snafu.

Comment by Sabinus 1 day ago

There should be a law that says whenever a private equity firm buys a business, the business must notify all the customers. The PE skinwalking of old company reputations is something customers need to be aware of in a well functioning market.

Comment by tredre3 1 day ago

> Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now.

Namecheap's cavalier attitude long predate private equity, let's stop blaming the evil financiers for everything. I'm sure it's going even further downhill from here because of it, but what happened to OP happened to others before as well and is par for the course when being a namecheap customer.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

>let's stop blaming the evil financiers

I respectfully disagree with this generalization, considering how often they deserve blame in practice.

Comment by sitzkrieg 23 hours ago

happy porkbun customer of many years here

Comment by crossroadsguy 23 hours ago

So am I. But I have already told myself that one day I WILL have to move to a "new Porkbun". Because such services are small, privacy focused services, until someone starts pouring dollar buckets at them. Until then porkbun it is. But I am mentally prepared.

Comment by crabmusket 1 day ago

For something as basic as domain name registration, absolutely. It takes someone willing to be a bit philanthropic to do it, I guess.

Comment by terribleperson 1 day ago

...seriously? Where do I jump ship to now?

Comment by deadalus 1 day ago

Porkbun. Yes, Cloudflare Domains exists but let's support the small guys.

Comment by cube00 1 day ago

Given Cloudflare's reputation for shakedowns once you pass their undisclosed thresholds I wouldn't trust them with my domains.

I'm not expecting something for nothing, we all need to eat. I'm happy to stay within any limits or even have no free tier at all.

I just don't want the fear of waking up to a sales email one morning demanding I suddenly fork out more then I earn in a year off the project for an enterprise plan because I've exceeded their undisclosed thresholds.

Comment by ElijahLynn 1 day ago

Can you expand more on cloudflare's shakedowns? I have some domains on Cloudflare and thought they were a trustworthy service. Is there there anything particular you can point to?

Comment by kevindamm 1 day ago

I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.

I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.

Comment by cube00 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

You could argue in that case it was a gambling site and it will never happen to you because you're not in a high risk category.

The scary thing for me is nowhere in their initial communications did they explain the issue they just demanded $120k upfront (refusing monthly billing).

The CEO who is usually active on HN didn't show up to give their side either, there's no way they couldn't have been aware of a 1044 upvoted post which also went viral elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979

Comment by 0x3f 1 day ago

It's just traffic based: sales try to get you on a paid plan, or a higher tier. For some accounts they've given ultimatums ("pay for the higher tier by x date or we have to stop providing service"). But I believe those cases were e.g. online casinos doing specific things with the platform (say, evading national blocks on gambling websites) IIRC.

Comment by Imagenuity 19 hours ago

I've been using Porkbun for several years now. No problems and terrific service.

Comment by kibwen 1 day ago

It would be worth recommending a non-US-based registrar, since the Texas government just demonstrated that they can unilaterally suspend any domain managed by any US registrar.

Comment by dabber 10 hours ago

Are you referring to what happened with motherless? If so, using a non-US-based registrar probably wouldn't have made a difference in that case. The court order that took the domain offline targeted the .com registry operated by Verisign, not any individual registrar.

Comment by joshuamcginnis 1 day ago

I like https://www.dynadot.com/. Good prices and privately owned for 30+ years.

Comment by wrs 1 day ago

They say they started in 2002, but same here, I've had hundreds of domains on Dynadot since the early 2000s with no problems.

Comment by joecool1029 20 hours ago

Been moving all my domains to them for a couple years now. Happy so far with them and they handle some of the harder tld’s to find a registrar for.

Comment by punk_ihaq 1 day ago

I've been a happy customer of https://njal.la/ for years

Comment by kilroy123 1 day ago

I moved all my from name cheap to porkbun years ago.

Comment by progbits 19 hours ago

You can also buy .is domains directly from the ISNIC registry. Or .de, .to, and few others support that.

No registrar needed, they are useless middlemen anyway.

Comment by Biganon 19 hours ago

I have everything at Infomaniak. Granted, I'm Swiss, but I think they're great for anyone.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by OutOfHere 1 day ago

Two more are NearlyFreeSpeech and UnstoppableDomains.

The latter also supports crypto domains which have no chance of a takeover except by government order, although crypto domains require the client to install a browser extension or other software to resolve. The good thing about crypto domains is that there should be no renewal fee, although there will be a fee to update the record.

Comment by iamnothere 1 day ago

Seconding the NFSN recommendation, they are great if you are technically competent. They even have optional security settings that can permanently lock you out of your account if you lose your recovery credentials, in case you want to be super strict about it. They are very clear that recovery will be impossible if you use those settings. I really like this and wish more services would offer this kind of “hard” commitment.

Comment by deejaaymac 1 day ago

Porkbun!

Comment by viccis 1 day ago

Enshittification and PE sellouts are great for DNS providers because migrating it can be a real pain sometimes and carry a high risk if something goes wrong. It's why so many of them are chains of "Buy through Company N! We used to work for Company N-1 before they sold out!"

Comment by Adachi91 1 day ago

I moved from Namecheap 2 years ago when I had auto renew on but it did not auto-renew, which their system automatically turns your domain into an advertisement hell page. Transfer system was locked and I contacted them and told them to transfer it to my other registrar or I would file an ICANN complaint. I moved it to my main registrar (Hover) which while more expensive I haven't a problem with them in the decades I've been with them. My original registrar shutdown sometime in the mid 2000s and Hover picked up my domains, so I'm all in over there now.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

Just a few weeks ago I moved from Namecheap to Porkbun. That's not an advertisement - I simply Googled popular registrars. But it is an indictment of Namecheap. They are going the way of GoDaddy. Please move away from them immediately. They are shifting to short-term strategies (high prices, immoral data practices, etc).

Edit: Apparently they were bought by private equity just weeks before I noticed something was wrong. Not a coincidence, I'm sure. We need to legally destroy private equity takeovers. They are pure evil and nothing but a negative force, at least in the USA.

Comment by rickydroll 1 day ago

Is it time to change registrars already? I fled Gandi a while ago because of private equity fuckery. And now I need to go somewhere else. Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?

No wonder people are leaving tech to go be goat farmers.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by NetOpWibby 1 day ago

Gandi got EXPENSIVE which is unfortunate because they often had TLDs no one else had first. I'm still with them for a single domain. Once Cloudflare supports .se, I'm outta there!

Comment by js2 1 day ago

> Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?

I don't have a crystal ball, but NearlyFreeSpeech was recommended to me in 2010 and I've been using it since 2012. I don't think it's changed at all in that time.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/respect

Comment by acidburnNSA 1 day ago

Their FAQ says they use Public Domain Registry to actually buy the domains. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Endurance International Group, who is owned by Clearlake Capital, a PE firm! So while it may shield you a bit, if you're moving from namecheap just to avoid PE then that may not be the most obvious choice.

https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/difftos

https://publicdomainregistry.com/about-us/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearlake_Capital

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

I use NFS for hosting, and I agree they are still good. But it's just a matter of time. Always be ready to move.

Comment by chrismarlow9 1 day ago

I am also looking for something that will last for a good while.

Comment by em-bee 1 day ago

namecheap has had a mixed reputation for several years now. when i took over responsibility for a domain registered on namecheap the first thing i did was move it off there (to gandi, because that was before gandi was sold) because i heard some problematic stories about namecheap. it baffles me everytime i see namecheap recommended.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

Namecheap was one of the popular alternatives to GoDaddy, recommended by techies. That's changed now, but I'm not surprised people haven't all caught up to its new reputation.

Comment by dgudkov 1 day ago

What makes you think the same can't happen with Porkbun?

Comment by happytoexplain 14 hours ago

I never implied that. It seems unrelated to what I said.

Comment by dgudkov 9 hours ago

The question remains without your implication.

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by fsuts 20 hours ago

It may, but what’s that got to do with moving away from namecheap?

Namecheap is not even cheap for names anymore, their renewal prices made me transfer elsewhere

Comment by ryandrake 1 day ago

This kind of story makes me wonder what's the most popular/valuable domain I can take control of simply by being convincing over the phone. Sounds tempting!

I can't even log in to most web sites anymore without doing a side-trip to my E-mail inbox, "for enhanced security," but these clowns let you just take a domain by asking nicely!

Comment by nkrisc 1 day ago

In many countries that’s probably illegal, even if it’s easy. Just because a crime is easy to commit doesn’t mean it isn’t a crime.

So, keep it hypothetical.

Comment by arendtio 19 hours ago

Honest citizens think like that; others wonder what the punishment is, even if it is illegal. I mean, maybe paying a fine vs maybe getting access to a popular domain?

At least corporations seem to work like that. Not following the law seems completely okay as long as the fine is not X% of their annual turnover.

Comment by paxys 1 day ago

I can’t think of a jurisdiction where it would not be illegal. The “I was only testing your security, in fact I should get rewarded for it” defense never works outside of nerd fantasies.

Comment by nkrisc 14 hours ago

I agree, it’s likely illegal in any modern state with rule of law. But I don’t actually know that for sure.

Comment by jacobgkau 1 day ago

Be careful, I assume there are laws on the books that normal people wouldn't know about but a large enough target could use if you tried to pull this on them (or you could find yourself on the receiving end of a civil lawsuit).

Comment by geuis 1 day ago

I've been a long, long term customer of Namecheap as well.

Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.

The poster didn't indicate if they had this feature enabled or not for the domain. It would have prevented the college club person from even seeing their email address to initiate a password reset.

This clearly isn't an answer for NC's customer support personnel and company policies.

But I've been a happy customer for many years and I discourage others from immediately reading other comments and rushing to jump to other registrars without doing your due dilligence.

Remember that in any situation, the people most likely to leave negative comments and reviews are the people that have had genuine bad experiences or feel like they've been slighted, even if unwarranted.

Comment by Thrashed 1 day ago

I did have domain privacy enabled. NC allows people to initiate a password reset via username, email address, or domain name.

I was a happy customer right up until this incident. And I certainly agree that due diligence is a must for something as critical as a registrar.

Comment by geuis 1 day ago

Glad you posted your experience. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for shenanigans on my own domains.

Comment by eviks 1 day ago

How will that help you prevent the transfer? The OP also "kept his eye out"

Comment by blcArmadillo 1 day ago

Did you have 2FA enabled too?

Comment by Thrashed 1 day ago

Yes it was enabled but it's unclear to me how effective it would've been in this case.

I attempted to login after support changed the password, but prior to the club president connecting with me. So I filed a support ticket that my password stopped working, and to NameCheap's credit they locked the account shortly thereafter. I worked with support later to regain access.

I don't know for sure if the club president was able to successfully auth with the new password before NC locked the account at my request. To be completely transparent, keeping this domain on my personal account was a legacy arrangement that probably should have been handed off sooner. Student club turnover being what it is, I was just renewing it so it wouldn't get squatted. We are fully transferring ownership to them now so there's no friction.

It's fair to criticize this arrangement as messy. Regardless, NC shouldn't have simply handed over the account to an unverified phone caller.

Comment by system2 1 day ago

Password reset would bypass 2fa.

Comment by throwaway219450 1 day ago

I’ve reset 2FA with a known password and it was pretty onerous. Had to provide a lot of info: username, full name on account, other domains, phone number, order number, email, invoice IDs and payment proof. Asking for my legal ID would have been an improvement, but someone would need a lot more than “pretty please” on the phone.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by paxys 1 day ago

How is domain privacy relevant here? That only hides your email from public records. What if the attacker already knows it (as they did in this case)? Email address is quite literally something you are meant to share publicly. It is not a password.

Comment by Thrashed 1 day ago

I think their point was that if WHOIS data were hidden, a password reset request that relied on providing the email address would've been impossible. But since NC's account management allows visitors to provide just a domain name to generate an unlock email, domain privacy wouldn't be a protective layer here.

Comment by paxys 1 day ago

I still don’t get the argument. Say I call your bank and convince them to give me full control of your account. Are you going to go “well the bank didn’t publish my account number anywhere, so they are in the clear”?

Comment by Thrashed 1 day ago

I agree, it's not an excuse to hand over an account. I think that commenter was considering practical mitigations for a broken system, not necessarily absolving NC of responsibility had my WHOIS been public.

Comment by vel0city 1 day ago

Registration info usually also includes a physical address and names.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

i agree that's important to hide, but also irrelevant to preventing what happened here.

Comment by 0x3f 1 day ago

Seems pretty relevant to a social engineering attack to have more correct pieces of info to give to support.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

by "what happened here" i mean this specific post. in this specific post, address information was not required.

Comment by 0x3f 7 hours ago

That's not clear to me.

> He convinced them the domain registered in my name and address really belonged to his club

Convinced how? Often such things are via "knowing things" about the account holder.

Comment by john_strinlai 7 hours ago

the author explicitly said they had domain privacy on. so we know that the caller did not have the address information.

and we can be certain that domain privacy wouldn't have helped in this case (because it didn't).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028611

>Convinced how? Often such things are via "knowing things" about the account holder.

i have some experience with social engineering attacks (former infosec turned teacher) and it was probably a combination of:

    - caller confidence that they were the club owner/manager (because they were)
    - offering/sending club-specific information that matched information on the site (flyers, pamphlets, etc.)
    - "call the number on the website and i will answer it"
    - an official college website page that had the caller listed as an owner/manager of the club
    - some poor 20-something year old working in a hellish, windowless tier 1 tech support center

Comment by turpentine 21 hours ago

https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/post/3mnkqgxostk2k - This is recent and inexcusable sloppy work for a domain registrar. Private equity explains it if they're cutting and offshoring operations. Even if they hadn't been acquired by PE, it is still inexcusable. They didn't even bother to respond publicly to explain how it happened and that they're course correcting.

Comment by fsuts 20 hours ago

>Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.

Many/most domain registrars now give free domain privacy, so that’s not a reason to stay with namecheap.

Namecheap renewal rates are also higher than many others so surprises you have stayed and paid above market rates

Comment by palmotea 22 hours ago

> Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.

That's not exactly true. IIRC, it's not allowed for .us domains.

Comment by tredre3 1 day ago

Namecheap's privacy WHOIS still shows a unique email address so that the owner is reachable. Sending mails to it would have been forwarded to OP.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

Agreed - I switched away from Namecheap, but do research. Don't just switch because a couple people on HN did.

Comment by dalmo3 1 day ago

I've had the exact same issue with a small local registrar.

Had an account where I managed multiple clients. One of the clients had their "IT guy" contact the registrar for a DNS change. The registrar promptly gave the guy full access to my account, changing the password and locking me out in the process.

As soon as I regained access I moved everything off there.

Comment by sixtyj 1 day ago

Don’t be shy. Tell us the name.

This is unacceptable and such companies should change their policy or be out of business.

Comment by ivanmontillam 1 day ago

And it wouldn't even be a defamation lawsuit because it's true.

Comment by rmunn 1 day ago

In countries with a sensible legal system, yes. Truth is not a defense against defamation in all countries. I can't know what country you (generic you) are in, so best to look up your local laws on defamation.

Comment by preg_match 21 hours ago

This is basically sim swaps attacks or number porting attacks but for domains.

If the telecos can figure it out, anyone can. Yes it took them way too long, but those attack vectors are essentially dead now.

Comment by addaon 1 day ago

Well, they didn't call it NameCompetent, did they?

Comment by Retr0id 1 day ago

They're not even cheap these days, either. I'm still with them as a matter of laziness but I really need to migrate out.

Comment by jolan 1 day ago

Cloudflare offers domain registration/renewal with no markup if you're looking for an option. I moved to them after AWS increased fees.

Comment by appcustodian2 1 day ago

i'm sure that will last

Comment by fsuts 20 hours ago

It’s a loss leader for their other products so it may well do

Comment by The_Blade 1 day ago

namechintzy.com is available

Comment by prmph 1 day ago

Yep, never own a domain with NameCheap.

My experience was kind of opposite, but still bad nonetheless. I lost domains I had with them simply because I lost the phone I used for 2FA. After several calls to them, they requested some info. I supplied all they wanted, but it took them more than a year to get back to me, by which time I had lost all interest in maintaining domains with them.

Luckily these were not critical domains; I had bought them in anticipation of building a business on them.

I am moving my domains to CloudFlare.

Comment by petecooper 1 day ago

+1 for Porkbun. I use tld-list.com to shop around for registrars when I need a TLD that Porkbun don't handle.

Comment by richardchilders 1 day ago

Namecheap forces users to log in to identify themselves. So far, OK.

But then when one attempts to pay for a domain, after one has already provided all of one's credit card information to Namecheap ... Namecheap up and refers its customers to something called Link, which forces Namecheap's customers to create an account and become Link's customers - providing all that confidential credit card information, all over - leaving the customer wondering why Namecheap collected it and what they are going to do with it.

Link forces you to authenticate via SMS so that they know where you are.

This all happened less than 24 hours ago and I was already getting ready to put domain service shopping on my list of things to do but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.

I nominate Paul Vixie as a possible candidate for CTO or even CEO of a hypothetical nonprofit DNS domain service.

More info: uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy

Comment by Walf 1 day ago

Link is just payments processing done by Stripe.

https://stripe.com/payments/link

If you've bought anything online recently, especially if it's not obvious who's collecting the payment details or it looks like first party on the checkout page, you've probably used Stripe.

Comment by ryandrake 1 day ago

But in those cases you don't have to sign up for it, or create an account with SMS verification. That should be totally unacceptable.

Imagine going to a grocery store and when you want to buy your pack of soda and chips, they tell you: Woah there, pardner! You need an account with MyPaymentProvider before you pay for those groceries! Oh, and you'll need to set up a password and give them your mobile number...

Comment by Walf 1 day ago

Yeah, I don't love it. Forcing phone numbers is the worst, as I've practically never needed to call or be called about a purchase, but it's a de facto ID.

Comment by Cider9986 20 hours ago

Plenty of services to buy domains with Monero because traditional finance online is a surveillance hellscape.

Comment by assimpleaspossi 1 day ago

I just renewed my domain last February, I think, and didn't have to do that. When did that start?

Comment by paxys 1 day ago

People are (rightfully) concerned about superintelligent AI but social engineering continues to be by far the biggest attack vector for digital infrastructure. And it’s being made worse by companies continuously cutting costs in areas like support.

The call center employee making third world minimum wage doesn’t give a shit who the real owner of the domain is. They want to end the call quickly and get 5 stars from the customer on the feedback form.

I have made it a point to move off services that force SMS-based 2fa for this exact reason. Recently even changed banks because of this.

Comment by preg_match 21 hours ago

Social engineering attacks can be thwarted by technical measures.

For example, try to social engineer a sim swap attack or number port attack with sim lock and port lock turned on. Won’t work. These attacks were super common just 5 years ago, now they’re effectively dead in the US.

You have to technically make sure the customer service people can’t break security. If you give them the keys, you’re cooked. So put the keys in a vault and then cover the vault in spikes and a 5 day timer.

Comment by Georgelemental 1 day ago

Superintelligent AI is getting very good at social engineering. See e.g. voice cloning scams

Comment by ethin 1 day ago

Honestly I'm wayyy more concerned with social engineering attacks than some theoretically superintelligent AI. Social engineering is, IMO, the far worse of the too

Comment by mook 1 day ago

Isn't prompt injection basically social engineering for LLMs already anyway?

Comment by ethin 20 hours ago

Pretty much. Which is why I'm far more concerned about that. So many of the AI doomers are terrified of some super-intelligent autonomous AI doing something on it's own that wipes us out (and, mind you, they have no evidence that any super-intelligent AI would actually do that, other than si-fi, but that's a different topic). But there's nothing stopping us from doing something stupid like developing some super-intelligent AI that has yet to not have any reason to disobey the "help the user" and is subsequently socially engineered to do something horrible that ends up destroying a nation for example.

Comment by thegrim33 1 day ago

The same namecheap that at the outset of the Ukraine war decided to terminate the service of every single one of their customers (private citizens, businesses, everyone), that had a Russian address associated with their account? Well, if you're still using them, that's on you.

Comment by n8n_and_coffee 1 day ago

This is disheartening to hear. This year I began slowly switching my domains to NameCheap from Godaddy before renewal because of the huge difference in price plus the added NameCheap free stuff Godaddy charges extra for. I guess there's a reason NameCheap is cheap :(

Was your domain in 'locked' status, preventing transfers etc?

Comment by Thrashed 1 day ago

Yeah the domain was/is locked. The domain wasn't transferred - the NC account that owned the domain was handed over.

I also moved from Godaddy to NC. For me it was 2013 when GoDaddy supported SOPA.

Comment by system2 1 day ago

If the price is your concern, the Cloudflare registration is only $10.

Comment by bel8 1 day ago

I moved my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap some years ago.

And recently from NameCheap to Cloudflare once I heard NameCheap changed owners.

So far, so good. If Cloudflare messes up my domains, of all things, I might as well quit tech and become a farmer.

Comment by kcartlidge 10 hours ago

Everyone has different requirements and experiences. I switched to Moniker about 4 or 5 years ago and have about a dozen domains there. Never any issues, and a reasonable system.

Comment by dvdyzag 1 day ago

I'm chuckling nervously.

Previous discussion from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638028

Something about a bounty, the original source is down.

Comment by Georgelemental 1 day ago

I left Namecheap when they took away Databases for Palestine's domains for daring to publish evidence of the Gaza genocide. They do not deserve your business https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/01/03/namecheap-gaza...

Comment by velcrohn 11 hours ago

Since you brought it up... The population of Gaza has been going up since 1948. Before Hamas attacked, tens of thousands of Gazans had work permits in Israel, and many Gazans were treated in Israeli hospitals.

After Hamas started a war, Israel provided food, power, water, fuel, and medicine with intermittent interruptions. They had ceasefires to provide vaccines for children. Israel warned civilians of imminent attacks, and generally gave them time to move. That rarely happens in a war, never mind a genocide.

It is absolutely true that tens of thousands of civilians were killed, although it is difficult to quantify because Hamas soldiers do not wear uniforms and has 100% of its military capabilities around and below hospitals, mosques, schools, and apartments. Also, Gazan authorities have never distinguished military and civilian casualties in their reporting. And despite having the world's largest bomb shelter, i.e. 500 km of tunnels, Hamas did not allow a single civilian into them during the war.

But stipulating tens of thousands of civilian deaths during an intense urban fighting, there is a name for that. The name for that is "war". Genocide is an entirely different phenomenon. You seem to conflate the two.

Comment by Georgelemental 8 hours ago

About my use of the word "genocide": genocide is defined not primarily by the scale of the killing, but most importantly by the intent behind it. The intent of the war on Gaza, as expressed repeatedly by the people prosecuting it, is to destroy the Palestinian people as a people. That's what makes it a genocide, not just the raw number of dead. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/doc.1_convention_o...

(In the interest of keeping things on topic for HN, I won't respond to your other points)

Comment by h0mie 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by newsomix9xl 22 hours ago

I'd say asking nicely is a kind of social engineering.

It may not be some Mitnick level impersonation of a Senior VP on vacation needing an urgent change kinda trick but the point of S.E. was that it played on the human element and namely cooperation of same.

How it was obtained was not strictly defined AFAIK.

Comment by hmokiguess 1 day ago

Humans are the weakest link, wouldn't be shocked if it's some underpaid off shore call centre or whatever. That's not a vulnerability though, that is social engineering, the attack vector was a human and the exploit was a form of identity theft.

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by jacobgkau 1 day ago

I stopped trusting Namecheap when they shunted all Russian users due to the Ukraine war. While it wasn't against ICANN regulations (since they did facilitate transfers out), it seemed against the spirit to me for them to do that to individual people and small businesses who weren't legally sanctioned.

I kept a couple of domains on them for a while simply because their prices for some exotic TLD's were significantly lower than my previous go-to of Hover, but now Porkbun's got them beat on everything I use, anyway, so I'd transferred the last of them out over the past year or so.

Comment by slig 1 day ago

Yes, and also this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

Comment by bellowsgulch 1 day ago

I also didn’t like that, said as much, and had a bunch of people downvote me because I said I didn’t want my utility company playing politics.

Comment by xyst 1 day ago

Notably, they have been bought out by private equity.

> September 2025, CVC Capital Partners acquired a majority stake in Namecheap for an undisclosed amount, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.[3][4] Kirkendall stepped down as CEO on December 16, 2025

But prior to this they have had many incidents. Switched all domains to porkbun a few years ago

Comment by superkuh 1 day ago

Yep. I've been with Namecheap for a similar length of time. This week they sent me an email saying I had to update my namecheap profile information or they would close my account in 24 hours.

They locked my account so I couldn't log in. To be clear, my whois information was fullly legally compliant, and I was happy to also update my namecheap profile, but when I sent them an email they didn't get back to with an response email until there was just an hour left.

Things had been going down hill slowly and lots of my peers have already moved on to porkbun, etc, but I think now things are going downhill quite fast. I did manage to save my account (and so domains) but now I will be moving to a new registrar.

Comment by iAMkenough 1 day ago

24 hours is a ridiculously short warning period, especially when they lock you out from meeting their demands yourself.

What if their email got caught in a spam filter? What if you only check that inbox a few times a week or after business hours?

I'll be moving my personal domains after doing some research.

Comment by ramgine 1 day ago

I got that same email but skimmed it. I guess I need to double check and then move.

Comment by jddj 1 day ago

That sounds more like a phishing attempt than anything a real company should send.

I think I have one domain left with them. I haven't received anything yet, but it's a good reminder to move on.

Comment by ethin 1 day ago

> That sounds more like a phishing attempt than anything a real company should send.

And yet companies do it all the time. Which is hilarious because they also will happily tell you to beware of phishing and scams, but they do the exact same things a phisher/scammer would do

Comment by DANmode 1 day ago

> saying I had to update my namecheap profile information or they would close my account in 24 hours.

Did they mention what prompted this?

Are you aware of anything?

Comment by userbinator 1 day ago

Posted by a 3-hour-old account (as of this comment), and then multiple mentions of the same competitor in the other comments here. Make of that what you will...

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

It's normal for people to make accounts to express grievances. And it's normal for a registrar bought by private equity to begin slowly enshittifying. And Porkbun is very clearly the next most popular choice, regardless of this thread. In fact, it's even been pointed out that they may be the next to enshittify - not something a shill says.

I.e shilling skepticism is not rational in this case.

Comment by userbinator 1 day ago

not something a shill says.

Shilling has moved on from being 100% positivity, precisely because it's too obvious otherwise.

Comment by squigz 22 hours ago

The community response here is actually fascinating to me.

I would have expected at least some responses pointing out that this sounds far too bad to be true, and asking what parts of the story are we missing, as has happened when other stories like this show up.

Comment by captn3m0 1 day ago

Namecheap also suspended my primary domain because of a bug at their end: https://captnemo.in/blog/2026/05/05/namecheap-whois/

tl;dr: Namecheap configured Domain Privacy on my domain, which isn't allowed by my Registry (.in), and then suspended my domain coz the whois info was redacted.

I know a few other people that were impacted.

Comment by sandeepkd 1 day ago

In the absence of actual details its hard to say what was considered for making this decision. If I have to take a wild guess then being able to demonstrate the control on the webserver hosting the content could have been one way to prove ownership over the domain.

It can be called social engineering, however one can also put it in category of account recovery by verifying content control on the domain.

The part where it gets hairy is if your credit card was associated with the account, thats probably a recipe for disaster?

Comment by maxgashkov 1 day ago

Webserver control is never used and must not be used to prove domain ownership. If you're pwned and have to re-point to a server stood up from backup, having registrar relying on someone being able to put up a random file on a compromised machine would be a total security disaster.

Comment by sandeepkd 1 day ago

On a different note, adding a file on webserver is one of the ACME methods (HTTP-01) to get a SSL/TLS certificate so it is indeed considered as possession method in real world already

Comment by maxgashkov 1 day ago

You're missing that HTTP-01 challenge grants you no ability beyond what the check has demonstrated, i.e. you have proven that you're able to serve random file from a webserver, so the grant is to allow you to serve them via TLS connection.

There are no comparable _technical_ proof-of-registration methods because all of them would require actual access to registrar control panel and be outright silly ('point the domain to a random nameserver').

So no, proper registrars never use webserver control as means to prove identity or ownership.

Comment by sandeepkd 23 hours ago

> you have proven that you're able to serve random file from a webserver, so the grant is to allow you to serve them via TLS connection.

Its digression from the original topic, still, it goes way far than that, these certificates are signed by a CA that the client devices trusts by the virtue of root certificates installed on the device. If I can some how obtain the SSL/TLS certificate for google then thats a very big deal.

Comment by maxgashkov 23 hours ago

That's why it's very unlikely that you will be able to put a file under google.com/.well-known/acme-challenge

But if you somehow managed to do that, no one in the right mind would argue that you're free to undelegate the domain or point it to a NS you control.

Comment by sandeepkd 1 day ago

To clarify, my observation is around how it might have happened, not if this is the right way to do it

Comment by MetroWind 9 hours ago

I mean "cheap" is in the name...

Comment by system2 1 day ago

I have important domains on Namecheap. Should I move them to Porkbun or Cloudflare? I only buy cheap, throwaway-type domains with Cloudflare, as I find them too corporate-like to support me for my cheap $10 domain, and that's why I kept good ones with Namecheap despite their 2x pricing. I want to work with an American company with real support. (But not with godaddy of course).

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

Porkbun seems to be the current "correct" choice. That may change in one year or 10 years - but that's just how business works in the 21st century.

Comment by jacobgkau 1 day ago

For what it's worth, I have had brief one-on-one contact with Porkbun support once. Their checkout was failing when using PayPal one day, and a seemingly real person emailed in response to my ticket about an hour and a half later to let me know they'd corrected the issue.

Comment by assimpleaspossi 1 day ago

If you ignore this thread, did you even consider it before now? I've been with Namecheap for at least 16 years but this is the first I've read of complaints and never had any complaints myself. Which should make one question this whole thing altogether.

Comment by slig 1 day ago

I believe you did not see this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

Comment by assimpleaspossi 1 day ago

So now you need to dig into another anonymous post from over four years ago with no details of what happened?

Comment by system2 21 hours ago

I moved many domains to Cloudflare because of savings. I am just concerned about the good domains I really care about. And I was thinking about it recently. I really want to have an American company on American soil.

Comment by OutOfHere 1 day ago

It was not declared whether 2FA was enabled on the account or not. I will assume that it wasn't enabled.

Comment by mook 1 day ago

Hmm, I don't know the area well; why would 2FA have been relevant here? From the (unverified) story, the account was administratively handed over via support; there was no indication from any party that the account was hacked. So 2FA prompts would never be part of the picture.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

a support-initiated reset and transfer would bypass 2fa

Comment by phendrenad2 1 day ago

Ah namecheap. Stories about them make it to HN quite regularly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Comment by slig 1 day ago

This is the scariest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

Comment by terminalbraid 1 day ago

porkbun is really good

Comment by bellowsgulch 1 day ago

I’m not moving my business domains to a small business called Porkbun.

Comment by bschmidt2000 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by luciana1u 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by ButlerianJihad 1 day ago

So, reading through the holes in your story: you are not a leader of this club, nor a member, nor affiliated with the college at all. And the domain name wasn't actually "in use" but parked.

And the legitimate leadership of the college-affiliated club was able to prove to NameCheap that they had a right to the domain name, as it was (not a right to your account, but a right to their club's name on the Internet). And NameCheap cooperated in turning over control to those with legitimate rights to it, rather than whoever's credit card was on the last payment?

Am I in the ballpark here so far? Perhaps NameCheap did have ways of knowing who the rightful owner was, and who you are not--especially if it was a personal account, not a "college affiliated" or "faculty" account!

In your headline, you call the club leadership "an unverified third party" but the college, and the club, and its leadership are, in fact, a first party to this domain and its transactions, while you are the third party, and you also have no idea what verification steps were taken by NameCheap on behalf of the rightful owners, the college, the leadership, or their personal identities. You have no idea about what they did with that.

It's not your domain, and you're complaining about losing something that was never yours to begin with. So you helped pay for it. That was a mistake. The way you pay for club assets: your club has a treasurer, and your club has a "purse" or club account, and your club writes the checks. You wanna pay for something, make a donation to your club and/or college.

Thankfully, it looks like the mistakes have now been rectified.

Comment by kstrauser 22 hours ago

This is bullshit. There are legal processes in place to decide disputes. Absent those processes, possession is ownership, and it would be absolute madness and chaos if it weren't.

I could make pretty convincing letterhead "proving" that I own "Google Foods", but that doesn't mean a registrar should give me google.com. The correct process if I want to assert that is to sue for ownership and prove to a court that I'm the rightful owner, and to get an order compelling the registrar to transfer it to me. And if I can't, then Google gets to keep it. This is the only possible sane way to manage domain ownership.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 18 hours ago

> legal processes in place

Another hole in OP's story: when/how did they follow the legal dispute process, rather than just "shooting a couple emails" and creating a new HN account to complain about it?

Comment by kstrauser 9 hours ago

Another hole in your premise: where is the indicator that the legal system was involved, as opposed to contacting the registrar’s tech support?

Comment by assimpleaspossi 1 day ago

Scrolling through the current comments.

In the meantime, been with NameCheap for I don't recall how long with no issues whatsoever.

Comment by dessimus 1 day ago

Post your domain and we can see if that is still the case in a few days.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

Lack of a negative is the least compelling anecdote possible.

Comment by assimpleaspossi 1 day ago

How about 16 years of lacking a negative? Does that count?

How about never heard of any issues till this unverified, anonymous thread. Shouldn't that make one suspicious of it? Does that count?

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

I don't understand where the anger is coming from. No, of course it's not as valid as positives (i.e. "I experienced X" vs "I never experienced X"). See also: "Works on my machine."

I used Namecheap since 2011. This year, they lost me. The only difference between you and me is one bad experience.

Comment by linsomniac 1 day ago

CloudFlare has their plusses and minuses, but they do offer domain registration at cost, for example $10.46/year for .com (every year, not one of those deals for the first year then more expensive down the line).

Comment by foresto 1 day ago

Cloudflare has become a middleman and gatekeeper of the web, a single point of surveillance, and an enemy of the open internet. Giving them more business would make these problems worse. No thanks.

Comment by sigio 1 day ago

The problem is that they then force you to use them as a DNS host as well.

Comment by AussieWog93 1 day ago

Honestly I don't really see this as a bad thing for the average person. I don't register my domains with CloudFlare, but I do all my DNS through them and it's great.

Everything propagates in 10 seconds rather than 10 hours.

Comment by himata4113 1 day ago

You actually can use your own nameservers... if you pay for the business plan which is $2400/yr.

Comment by system2 1 day ago

I am totally fine with cloudflare DNS. There is nothing better with free tier out there. Can't beat $10.

Comment by greyface- 1 day ago

It boggles the mind that this is allowed by ICANN.