A friend had a domain registered at 123-Reg that he no longer wanted. It
was coming up for renewal later this month, and he offered to transfer
it to me. The domain was not locked, so I asked him for an auth code,
and immediately submitted a request to transfer it to
Namecheap,
my preferred registrar.
The transfer failed, and Namecheap sent me mail saying the domain was
locked. I checked, and it was. It had also already been transferred to
another sponsoring registrar (Mesh Digital, the company that owns both
123-Reg and Domainmonster). My friend contacted support to unlock the
domain, but by then of course the domain had entered the sixty-day
period during which it could not be transferred again. I was forced to
pay the renewal fee to them, and will now have to retry the transfer
after the embargo expires.
I suppose I could think of benign explanations for the above if I tried,
but I'm not feeling especially charitable about it.