This isn't about blackmail as jewsin writes in the comments, it's about the reputation a business suffers with a chargeback. All you would need to do is reverse the chargeback and the full charge would go away.

Disclosure: I work for Namecheap.

Still, I think my original points stand. I find Namecheap locking out unrelated domains and redirecting traffic unethical and in bad faith of the service provider / customer relationship. Not to mention that the domains continued to point to parking pages even after I paid up.

I'm sorry as well for the parking page situation - my guess is it didn't immediately propagate, but I'd have to investigate further as to why that happened. Usually, it's not about redirecting traffic but just not letting you get into your account. This does not sound like it should have happened at all. I sincerely apologize that this is what you encountered.

p.s. I love how trying to genuinely be helpful has resulted in an onslaught of downvotes. I'm going to assume you helped balance that out with an upvote. So thanks :)

I wish people wouldn't do that. It does appear that Namecheap has behaved very poorly in this case, intentionally or otherwise. Sadly, downvoting a person who works for an organisation has become a proxy for downvoting the organisation itself on HN recently, which doesn't seem constructive, particularly if that person is trying to share relevant information and/or improve the situation.

Sent my ticket number via the contact form on the website from your profile. I see that you spearheaded the SOPA membership surge - it's what got me to join in the first place.

Please write a blog post about this.

Also, $240 because of one chargeback, and doing the above while the customer is trying to sort out a fraud issue? Neither of those sounds like normal practice for a responsible domain registrar either.

Obviously there are two sides to every story and we're only seeing one here, but that one does look pretty bad for Namecheap.