Namecheap notified of breach of registrar accredition by ICANN [pdf]

The chronology at the end of the document is golden. I guess 'richard@namecheap.com' will have to re-think his inbound email handling :)

Perhaps adding a VIP-filter for `*@icann.org`.

What would this mean to namecheap customers?

Well in theory if they didn't cure the defects (and they most certainly will) all the registrations would get transferred to another registrar (because they would loose their ICANN accreditation).

But this is more of a black mark of sloppy neglect than anything else.

ICANN is very clear on the audit (we have gone through it) and only issues that type of warning if the registrar is lackadaisical and non responsive in some way. There are many registrars (+- 1000 last I checked) and you don't see many of these and they are mostly from registrars that are 1 step from getting canned, not major players like namecheap. It's a bit unusual.

Background on the ICANN audit program that this refers to.

http://www.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/audits