Epik’s new CEO Brian Royce is trying to rebuild Epik into his own fintech company using misappropriated customer escrow money to do it.
Three weeks before customers began reporting being unable to withdraw their money from Epik’s escrow service Masterbucks, founder and majority owner Rob Monster stepped down as CEO and appointed Brian Royce in his place. Many felt that was a very strange decision since Royce has no experience in the domain industry whatsoever, but he does claim to have experience in the fintech space, which, as it turns out, is just another gross exaggeration. Royce and Monster allegedly became acquainted through the latter’s Kingdom Ventures, with Royce asking Monster for $25,000 to build a paypal alternative. Monster apparently offered him the opportunity to do so while working for Epik; albeit with a massive catch.
Unfortunately for Epik’s customers, Royce has proven to be no better than his predecessor. He’s not only continuing Monster’s practice of obfuscating the truth and intimidating victims, Royce also spends money that should be used to pay back escrow customers on Epik’s operating expenses and his pet fintech project. Instead of remodeling his house like Monster, however, Royce plans on turning Masterbucks into a competitor to Paypal, as he declared on the DomainNameWire podcast:
Notice how Royce makes zero mention of repaying every customer their missing money. That could be because he views them as Epik’s old customers; his grand plans for a new Epik doesn’t involve domainers:
A majority of Epik’s other services and holdings are cheap, foreign white-labeled products. Royce is obviously aware of this, as he’s recently been liquidating Epik’s poorly thought-out purchases since receiving their $16,000,000 investment, which was based on fraud and later demanded to be returned .
The Providence Post has reached out to Royce inquiring about his development of any type of fintech. Royce claimed that all work on fintech, including masterbucks has been “halted. However, Masterbucks has seen regular updates with versions changing approximately every month since he took over 6 months ago. You can see in the screenshots below the current version of Masterbucks and on the URL “preview.masterbucks.com” you can see dev branch.
Notice the different versions:
You might be tempted to feel sorry for Brian for being Monster’s fall guy, but considering the fact that despite Epik selling off its assets many Masterbucks customers have still gone unpaid, meaning money that should be going to pay back the misappropriated escrow funds is now being misappropriated to build a fintech project.
Royce is doing exactly what he criticized Monster for doing: co-mingling customers’ escrow funds to fund his business and pet projects while customers such as Kathleen Kalaf are still owed tens of thousands of dollars.
Brian Royce could never find investors willing to trust him with money for his own projects, so he thought he could use Epik’s money, but found out that Epik didn’t have any money of its own, so now he’s stuck pawning off Rob Monster’s poor business purchases (many believe money laundering operations) and failed pet projects, ignoring the cries of victimized customers demanding their money back, and creating new victims daily all so he can fund a fake “free speech” paypal alternative borne from one of the largest ponzi schemes in internet history and owned by highly unethical people which no one will or should ever trust.
