I'm working on a website for a client right now who originally registered and set up his website with a company that, from what I've looked at of their set up, is basically one notch above a complete scam.

He's paying $$$'s/mo for nothing. I'm working on getting him switched over to a simple, cheap hosting plan- all he needs for his simple information based website. But he'd like to keep his .com and I can't figure out how to get this domain away from the scammers.

I've gotten into their system deep enough to figure out how to change the name servers- which would fix part of the issue- but they are charging him more than $80 just to renew the domain every year! From what I can tell from the whois, they are just a reseller of tucows hosting.

This isn't really my area of expertise, what do I need to do to get this domain away from these folks and registered with someone reasonable like godaddy or direcnic?

who is the admin contact for the domain? If your client is the admin contact (or you can change it so he is), then you'll be able to sign up with another registrar and transfer the domain quite easily.