But locking all of romanh's domains, so he can't take his business elsewhere, and transferring all of the traffic intended for his systems to somewhere else, does sound a lot like blackmail, not to mention blatant violation of how domain registration is supposed to work.

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.