Epik Holdings, Inc, on May 30th, 2023, sold their only remaining assets – Terrahost and their core business Epik registrar with some 400,000 domains under management (DUMs) – to an anonymous Wyoming LLC called Epik, LLC for approximately $4.9M.
Epik Holdings, Inc will be changing their name to Kingdom Ventures and maintain ownership of their other products such as Substratum, Amplify and of course the infamous Masterbucks, to name just a few. Rob Monster will again be the majority shareholder and CEO and existing shareholders will be converted to this new entity . None of these properties, however, have any real market value and in fact, some of them hold millions in customer debt.
Epik customers are obviously very concerned by this sale because they feel that those remaining assets should have been sold to repay them, first and foremost, and they now have no clear cut path to be made whole.
One of these customers that had been defrauded by Rob Monster for over $300,000 actually went to the trouble and expense to file a lawsuit, something no other creditor has done thus far. With that lawsuit they were able to temporarily stop this sale from taking place by filing a TRO, temporary restraining order, to get the settlement offer they were seeking, which they successfully got. That TRO filing included the full APA, asset purchase agreement, along with several typically bizarre emails from Rob Monster in which he blames and defames his victims in an attempt to deflect and obfuscate responsibility for his many financial crimes and fraudulent statements.
Here are some of the key parts of that APA which show the terms of the sale:
Asset Purchase Agreement Breakdown
Section 2 of the APA lists the 6 main distributions that make up the full purchase price of $4.9M.
1) Business Debt – $1.6M: Many, rightfully so, are wondering why these debts were paid back before making all of Epik’s creditors whole.
2) TVT – $1M: We don’t know the exact terms of the TVT loan but from what we were told by the ex CEO, Brian Royce, that loan was for $3M and taken out by Rob Monster just before Royce started as CEO and most of that money disappeared almost instantly into Monster’s own personal accounts. And from what we have seen from Monster’s personal messages to others he hadn’t repaid any of this loan at the time of the sale so it appears that TVT lost $2M on their dealings with Monster.
We reached out to TVT for comment about the recent sale and settlement and also asked them if they were still involved in any way with any iteration of Epik and they have not as of writing replied to our email.
3) Northstar (JJE) – $1M: Again, we do not know the exact terms of this loan but we do know from Monster’s public statements and private messages which have been leaked that the original amount was for $16M of which it appears only about $2M in real money has been repaid at the time of this sale. It seems there was some additional repayment by way of barter for servers and development work but the value of that was minimal, surely a value of less than $1M. So it appears that Northstar (JJE) lost about $12M on their dealings with Monster.
We reached out to Northstar (JJE) for comment about the recent sale and settlement and also asked them if they were still involved in any way with any iteration of Epik and they replied: “JJE is not the owner of Epik and has no relationship or affiliation with Epik or any of its past or present owners or management. JJE will never have an affiliation with Epik or any of its past or present owners or management.”
4) Mathew Atkisson (~$307K): We don’t know the exact amount that was paid to Adkisson as the amount was still in dispute at the time of the writing of this agreement but it was probably about $350K, which was the amount he was still owed plus attorney fees.
5) Monster Slush Fund ($380K): This is a set aside held in an escrow account designated for any pending debts Monster could be held responsible for, including Masterbucks. Both the new owners, Epik, LLC and Monster have to agree to release the funds. The actual amount Monster owes in Masterbucks and other debts is in excess of $4M so this $380K will go fast and at least $100K of it has already been used to repay Kathleen Kalaf. The new owners really should be held responsible for this amount as they knowingly purchased assets that were needed to repay Monster’s victims and then they can deal with Monster themselves to collect from him.
For those that aren’t aware, the scam Epik ran to run up such a large tab for Masterbucks was mostly based on the sale of domains through their illegal escrow service. When the buying party would deposit real money into the escrow account Monster would take the real and convert it to Masterbucks (fake money) in the sellers account and then do all he could to keep the seller from withdrawing those funds, including offering interest, in Masterbucks of course. he was able to get this illegal monetary exchange ponzi scheme upside down over $4 or 5M, maybe much more.
6) In-store credits ($600K): This is a set aside meant to cover all of the In-store credits that have accumulated over the last 60-90 days because Epik was taking payments for domain purchases and renewals, keeping the money to pay their own salaries and operating expenses and not renewing/purchasing the domains the money was intended for. This amount is also probably much more than $600K but the new owners will surely have to cover those charges and deal with Monster directly for the difference if they want to be repaid.
Here is the full asset purchase agreement along with bunch of crazy Monster emails. https://www.docdroid.net/MVi7Ebt/epic-epik-pdf
Epik, LLC – The New Guys are a lot like the old guys and just might be the old guys.
Sadly the new owners of Epik registrar and terrahost seem just as shady and indifferent to users as Rob Monster and old Epik and many have speculated that perhaps this new owner is actually Rob Monster. No one actually knows at this point and that is troubling. Epik catered to specific political persuasion as part of their marketing strategy (aka affinity grift) and now all of that user data, in real time, could be in the hands of George Soros or Hillary Clinton or China or take your pick. Their anonymity shows an utter lack of respect for their users as does their initial posts announcing the sale where they not only praised Rob Monster and Brian Royce, knowing perfectly well that they both ran a criminal enterprise that defrauded customers out of millions but even condescendingly mocked the victims of Monster and Royce’s financial crimes for complaining so much on social networking sites.
Anonymity and privacy are for users.
– Derek Peterson, CEO, Hope Holdings
Transparency and accountability are for owners.
In this rather bizarre blog post on Epik’s main site, a week after the sale, we have what seems to be a victory lap for Monster and Royce after a sale which left their financial victims with no assets to lean on and all their users in the hands of an unknown entity and it was signed by none other than Rob Monster. Why is Rob Monster allowed to make such posts on the new Epik’s website? It’s all very strange indeed.
And as if all of that wasn’t weird enough we have this new message from the new Epik, Epik, LLC where they finally admit that they have hired Monster and Royce. And some other very odd phrasing seems to connect old Epik with new Epik, ” …recommitting to our 9% …” It is looking more and more like that the new Epik is just the old Epik respawned with investor and escrow victim’s money.
So Epik, LLC was created in June of 2023 to purchase Epik assets but Masterbucks, LLC, where all the debt was dumped, was created on September 12, 2022, literally days after Brian Royce became the CEO of Epik Holdings, Inc. Almost like it was kind of planned from the get-go.
Here are the new guys trying to cover for Monster’s fraud by blaming hackers. Again, sounds an awful lot like things Rob Monster would say. Not a company trying to distance themselves from a corrupt former owner.
And here is Rob Monster claiming to be working at new Epik. I have seen other messages where he claimed to be running operations. Also, most of Epik’s old employees have been hired back by this new LLC. This whole secret LLC is looking and sounding a lot like the old Epik run by the same Monster.
Brian Royce the dirty double dipper:
Royce’s role at Epik seems to have been to cover up the crime scene and even take partial responsibility for some of Monster’s crimes or at least obfuscate responsibility. One of the first things Royce did when he came on at Epik was to hire a forensic accountant to figure out what happened but unsurprisingly they could not find any problems, even though there was about $20M missing and ponzi scheme that was at least $5M upside down. Leading up to the fraudulent sale Brian Royce was very busy trying to pressure and scare as many of Monster’s victims as he could into outrageously unfair settlements, 95% haircuts, as well as, I am sure, trying to do the same with the creditors that held more than triple the value of Epik in notes all so he could sell Epik to his friends on the cheap, probably for a nice commish and get a gravy gig afterwards.
There is not a registrar in the world that would need or want Brian Royce. His recent hiring is just more evidence that this was a very dirty deal and that Brain Royce was actually working in the interests of the buyer, Rob Monster and himself the whole time, not the interests of Epik’s customers, creditors or shareholders.
Mind of a Monster:
Many have speculated that Rob Monster is in fact the proud new owner of Epik, again. So what are the implications if Rob Monster is in fact the owner of Epik, LLC:
1 – It proves that Rob Monster embezzled ~$10M+ and hid it from creditors, customers and apparently even his own wife since he made her take out a $2M mortgage on her home.
2 – Monster and Royce stripped Epik Holdings Inc of all assets, maxed out credit, took Epik further into debt by continuing to steal from customers and not paying operating expenses and we can only assume paying themselves handsomely. All so creditors would not consider it worth their time and sign settlement agreements for pennies on the dollar.
If creditors had not agreed to settlements Monster would have been fine with letting Epik die, blaming the creditors, hackers, lefties or even Monster’s fall guy, Brian Royce but if that option would have played out then Monster would not have been motivated to attempt to redeem Epik and himself by repaying his customer victims and would simply have relaunched at a later date with a fresh start and been much more careful with revealing his embezzled money. However, his first choice was keep Epik alive but with no debt and bunch of money in the bank or at least a hidden crypto wallet and be the savior he always knew he was and in order to do that he was willing to be very reckless.
This idea of someone hurting their own company for profit is a somewhat complicated concept for those that don’t have criminal minds and aren’t sociopaths so let me use a simple analogy to try and explain. Imagine you owned a car and had a loan on that car. You knew the bank wanted to take the car back because you had not made a payment so you took out the engine, transmission, exhaust, doors, seats wheels, etc etc and then hid all those parts in a trailer. The bank comes to get your car and you say there it is, take it. They simply say never mind it isn’t worth the trouble and you say I’m really sorry about how this worked out but let me give you a hundred dollars for your trouble and we call it even. Banks signs settlement agreement and you are free and clear. Then you simply take the parts out of the trailer and resemble your car.
3 – Intentionally left all his victims hanging in the wind, unpaid, angry, afraid, broke and desperate when he had plenty of pay everyone back. He and Royce also tried to get as many of them as possible to take huge haircuts, some as much as 95% loss, so they would not have to deal with them later under the old Epik. They weren’t just deceiving their large corporate creditors into settlements but even their own customers.
4 – He and Royce were working together from the very beginning. One of the very first things Royce did when he started as CEO of Epik was to set up a new LLC for Masterbucks using the same service and address he would later use to set up Epik, LLC which was used to purchase Epik Holdings Inc’s assets. These are anonymous Wyoming LLCs and really the only way to find out who the owners are is file a lawsuit or trick one of their managers or attorneys into revealing.
5 – Monster and Royce knowingly lied about the financial status of Epik to their creditors and customers in order to defraud them all into settlements.
6 – Since Monster and Royce lied about the financial status of Epik all those settlement agreements they tricked people into signing can be torn up.
7 – Monster took his embezzled money out of hiding and put it back on the table for everyone to get at and there is no putting it back at this stage.
I firmly believe all these points are true even if Rob Monster is not the owner of Epik, LLC but if he is then it means that Monster’s embezzled funds are back on the table and served up for all of Epik’s “former” creditors that were defrauded into signing settlement agreements.
What kind of a Monster is he?:
I have heard some troubling reports about Monster’s personal life and family life which I will not be sharing in this article. However, the following examples are things that I have witnessed first hand or seen sufficient evidence to verify and are pertinent to issues at hand.
1) Monster covered up illegal content to keep his grift alive. In late 2018, right after Epik started domain hosting for Gab, I reached out to Monster to warn him about all the illegal sexual content on Gab — CGI child porn and lolicon — and how much of it was being monetized behind paywalls. I shared videos with him that I had made exposing those channels and showing that Gab was fully aware of them and I even gave direct links to some of those specific channels where such content existed. To my surprise Monster didn’t defend such content as “victimless” and “harmless” as many libertarian types do but he instead said that the content didn’t exist and that I was a liar and should be sued for defamation and he also demanded that I take down my videos “or else”. The type of person who will gas light and threaten someone for simply telling the truth in the face of overwhelming evidence is capable of about anything. Defaming, gas lighting and threatening people who expose his lies and crimes is very common tactic of Monster.
I have also been contacted by several law enforcement agencies, some international, that were investigating Monster’s connections to human trafficking and money laundering. They shared some interesting and pretty incriminating information with me but I have no idea what has happened to those investigations but again, all things are possible with a man like Monster.
2) Monster lied about his products and services with no concern for who he hurt.
I first experienced this myself back in 2019-20 when I discovered that the VPN service Monster was shilling and claiming was totally secure was actually a white label that he had no control over with a terrible ToS, which basically stated that any foreign government could simply request the data about a citizen of their country and without a court order the VPN service would hand over all the sites that user visited and connecting IPs. Grifts like that can literally get people put in prison or worse. When I exposed Monster’s lies and tried to warn others he again threatened me with defamation lawsuits, called me a liar publicly, tried to get me banned from all socials I was reporting him on and even repeatedly told me that “judgement was coming for me”, which seems to be his way of making physical threats while staying in legal bounds and simultaneously gaslighting from spiritual authority position.
A few short years later in 2021 Epik had what many experts called the most complete hack in internet history and what others described as the “Rosetta stone of the right”. All Epik user data — domain ownership, credit card details, emails, passwords, etc were published. And if that wouldn’t have been bad enough all their hosting customers server credentials were also leaked so the hackers were able to access all the websites hosted at Epik and get all their user data, emails, DMs, etc. This data, because of the very convenient timing of the hacks, was used to prosecute 100s of people in the political trials regarding January 6th. And has been used to persecute 1000s of people internationally for wrong think. We know of several Germans that were put in prison for “hate speech” because of the Epik data leaks. And, sadly, there have been several men that took their own lives because of the emotional, social and financial pressure these data leaks created for them in their personal lives.
Monster marketed Epik as the “Swiss Bank of Registrars” but it turns out that was a giant lie. Not only had the Epik code never been reviewed by anyone at Epik but it was actually owned and managed by a development company based in Ukraine for a monthly fee and had been since Epik’s inception.
3) Monster ran an illegal escrow and monetary exchange that fueled a massive Ponzi scheme.
Monster ran a pretty complicated criminal enterprise but the one scheme that seems to have been his bread and butter and netted him the most money, at least of what we know so far and aside from simply scamming investors, was his escrow/masterbucks ponzi scheme. The way it worked was that when some users wanted to exchange money for a domain name he would serve as an “escrow” service between the two and charge a 9% fee. When the buying party would deposit real money into the escrow account Monster would take the real money and convert it to Masterbucks (fake money) in the sellers account and then do all he could to keep the seller from withdrawing those funds, including offering interest, in Masterbucks of course. He was able to get this illegal monetary exchange ponzi scheme upside down over $5M from what we have seen but it may be much more.
It is also important to note for future readers that users could withdraw as $BTC or other cryptos when he did let them withdraw and no, Epik was not a registered exchange either.
This ponzi is nothing new, in 2019 Matt Barrie, CEO of escrow.com and Monster got into a little back and forth in which Barrie revealed that Monster sent him Epik’s full financials totally unsolicited in hopes that he would purchase Epik. Barrie also reveated that Epik’s illegal escrow service was way upside down. Check out this article for more on Epik’s Grifts.
4) Monster stole domains from domainers with large portfolios.
We have heard of several examples were Monster personally stole domains out of the accounts of domainers with large portfolios and we have seen solid evidence of at least one of those cases. It also appears that after he moved those stolen domains into one of his personal accounts he would then sell the domain very cheap and we assume got paid more in separate crypto payments. As if stealing from his own customers isn’t bad enough some of these domainers he stole from were his close personal friends.
5) Monster’s pattern of defaming, gas lighting, intimidating and extorting his victims.
Monster has a long record of gas lighting, intimidating and trying to extort others into silence. We’ve heard several examples where some of his escrow victims that were owed huge sums of money, all they had, were told that they had problems with fear and greed and that he would pray for them or other such nonsense. Here is our full article on Monster’s Pattern of Gas lighting, intimidation and extortion
6) Monster defrauded investors.
Monster defrauded investors and creditors out of more than $20M just in the last couple of years by making outrageously false claims about his products and services. He treated these victims pretty much the same way be treated his other victims, paying back small pieces and making big promises in an effort to stall them to keep them from filing any lawsuits. And when that tactic stopped working he would defame and gaslight them in hopes that they would not want to get into a fight with such a diseased man.
7) Monster embezzled millions.
Monster was handed $16M, stole at least $5M from customers and then year or so later given another $3M. As of the time of the sale he had only paid back about $3M of that money. That is over $20M!!! Where did all of that money go?! Why did Epik run up another $3M in debt the year leading up to the sale instead of using some of that $20M? Why were they unable to at least repay all of his escrow victims?
In all the chaos and confusion and false allegations and conspiracy theories coming from Monster it is important to not get sucked into his obfuscation and deflection games and remember Rob Monster disappeared over $20M USD and Brian Royce helped him bury the evidence. That is what all of this is really about.
Conclusion:
Most of Monster’s victims, users, customers, investors and creditors cared about the issues Monster espoused — free speech, Christianity, conservatism, etc, which is what makes his actions all the more egregious. He is a despicable man that took advantage of people’s good intentions and callously lied and stole from them with no regard for anyone or anything but himself.
This is still a developing story. We still don’t know who are the owners of the new Epik, LLC, we don’t know when and if Masterbucks victims will be repaid and of course we are still waiting for the hammer to drop on Monster and see a criminal complaint filed by Washington State AG or DOJ or SEC or anyone. There is also a strong likelihood that some of these Masterbucks victims will finally start filing lawsuits against Monster, Epik Holdings inc, Masterbucks, LLC and Epik, LLC. We will keep you updated as new developments arise.
This has been a very difficult situation for many and it is incredibly frustrating when a man like Rob Monster can hurt so many and get away with so many lies and outright criminality for so long with no justice but we remain hopeful that things will be made right at some point and continue the good fight.
Rob Monster lives in a home worth more than $8M, his wife owns a multi-million dollar medical practice and he surely has many millions hidden in crypto so we are all hopeful that at some point, when his lies are revealed through civil or criminal actions or more than likely his own never ending desire to make himself appear as righteous, and his embezzled millions are revealed that any settlement agreements anyone signed can be torn up because they were based on fraud and EVERYONE can be made whole and Monster can rot in prison for the rest of his pathetic and miserable life for the hurt he has caused so many.
