ICANN has told RegisterFly that it is in violation of its operating agreement and has given them 15 days to repair serious operational problems. If not RegisterFly will lose its accreditation. RegisterFly customers have been complaining for months and the situation has now become critical.
Kevin Medina, the President and Chief Executive Officer of RegisterFly has been fired. Unified Names, the parent company of RegisterFly has filed suit against Kevin Medina. The suit charges that Medina was spending $10,000 per month in corporate funds for rent on a Miami Beach penthouse apartment, $9,000 for escort services and $6,000 for liposuction surgery.
RegisterFly states that more than 75,000 customer domains expired because of the company's financial and management problems.
RegisterFly has said that after Kevin Medina was terminated he deleted email accounts, access to support tools, and access to their risk/billing department to issue refunds.
ICANN says that RegisterFly employees in their Risk/Fraud Department worked on a pure commission basis and that caused overcharging and retaliation against customers who complained.
ICANN also states that owes them over $130,000 in back accreditation fees.
ICANN says Registerfly did not give its customers the codes needed to transfer their names to competing registrars and that Registerfly kept customer domain names locked so they couldn't be moved.
There are customer complaints that Registerfly double, triple or quadruple-billed for domain names and would deny customers access to their names if they tried to chargeback their credit cards.
ICANN has complaints that many RegisterFly customers paid for multi-year domain registrations but the registrations were only made for one year. Recently thousands of Registerfly customers paid to have domains registered which weren't registered because Registerfly didn't have a sufficient cash float with the domain registry.
Registerfly controls about two million names for about 900,000 different owners.
RegisterFly is also an SSL certificate authority. Approximately 460 site owners are currently securing sites with FlySSL certificates.
Here are some links to articles with additional details:
ICANN rides to the rescue in Registerfly meltdown | The Register
Registrar threatened with ICANN shutdown - Computer Business Review
Registerfly files suit against ousted CEO | The Register