Info Needed, Ever Use Escrow.com?

[j2fast]

Anyone ever use Escrow.com for any type of transaction?? It appears to be an Ebay company or at least affiliated some how so it appears legit. Opinion on the WWW appear to be good.

I'm looking at buying a car for my wife and the seller (Private individual) travels a lot and wants to use escrow.com for the money transfer. The car is too good of a deal to pass up, so I'm leaning towards buying it.

There appears to be good policies in place, like I get the car and can return it after inspecting it at no cost. Escrow.com holds all of the money until I give the OK to release it to the seller.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks

Jim

[al503]

I used it for my very first ebay purchase many years ago. They've been in business for a long time and everything went like clockwork.

If you're unsure/deal is too good to be true, it might be worth paying their fees for a little more piece of mind. I'm sure if something goes wrong, it'll still be headache but at least the other party hasn't made off with your $$$.

[CenTexSlim]

The car is too good of a deal to pass up, so I'm leaning towards buying it.

You know the saying.. if it looks too good to be true it probably is. I have a friend that got burned for $5500 (gone, out the window, kaput) trying to buy a Jeep off of Ebay. Now he didn't use this particular "go through" (Escrow.com) but the "hack" that took him for the money had it rigged where emails & money transferred appeared to go through "official" sites & all. Buddy had friend run the vin after he transferred the money & turns out the Jeep was registered in LA. Looked up the owner listed on the vin & called him & asked if his jeep was in Colorado (per ebay listing) & for sale. Answer, nope, not for sale.. it's sitting here in my driveway (in LA).

I think the "seller (Private individual) travels a lot and wants to use escrow.com for the money transfer" just seems like a little bit of a red flag.

Do all the homework you can & double & tripple check everything. Better to pay a little more (even going price rather than "good deal") than to pay the good deal price & never see the $$ or the car again.

Not saying that ligit deals don't go down, but be wary..

[j2fast]

Oh ya, as soon as I heard the bit about traveling I was instantly skeptical. I ran the VIN on carfax and everything came up OK. Although I'm yet to see Carfax pull up anything bad after running a half about 10 cars through it. Might try to call in a favor, a good friend of mine's brother-in-law is the local Chief of Police. Maybe I can get them to run the VIN for me.

I'm not buying it sight unseen, luckily it's located just a couple of hours from me. The seller agreed (in writing) to let us pick up the car before releasing the money to him. We'll see, thanks for the responses.

[Front Man]

Escrow.com gives it away.

If you have money in it seek legal counsel.

FM

[bberkley]

We used escrow.com at work to purchase a domain name that the marketing folks wanted to snap up. Worked ok for us.

[shred]

Make sure it's really Escrow.com and not a seller-supplied link that just looks like it's Escrow.com too. That's a popular scam lately.