I just got this from a namecheap customer service chat:

"Please let me explain the transfer mechanism in order to make it more clear. On the first stages of the transfer process our system needs to obtain the full domain contact information from the old registrar. Their system should provide us with the full Whois data on the domain automatically in order for us to start the Verification process and be able to proceed with the transfer initiation. Currently Godaddy blocks our IP addresses and does not provide our system with the full contact information (they are not disclosing the email addresses listed with domains), thus we need to gather this data manually"

I do a whois and get all the information, apparently they don't.

I am having the EXACT same problem. My domains look like this on namecheap http://imgur.com/mtSsd and they said that GoDaddy was blocking them from getting the Whois info as well.

I understand not wanting to jump to conclusions but I trust GoDaddy about as far as I can throw the elephants that their CEO shoots...

Looking up whois info manually might work if you only have a few domains to process, but not when you have a lot. Not very efficient.

I've been monitoring the progress of companies transferring away from GoDaddy and have been getting timeouts on Whois requests myself.

But they do a lot more requests. With the amount of transfers they get now, some automatic DDoS protection could kick in.