Escrow fixes one thing and fixes it completely: once the seller's crypto is locked, the seller cannot take it back by disappearing, and a dispute is decided by someone who is not either of you. Everything that still goes wrong on P2P platforms happens outside that boundary. Knowing the edges is more useful than trusting the word escrow.
What escrow covers
- The seller cannot sell the same coins twice or vanish after you pay: the crypto left their balance when the trade was accepted.
- The seller cannot refuse to release and keep both: silence escalates to a dispute automatically on iEscrow, and an arbiter decides with the receipts.
- The "cancel the order after you paid" trick: on iEscrow a trade cannot be cancelled by anyone once accepted.
Where buyers still lose, and what to do
Paying outside the trade
A seller asks you to pay "directly, faster" or to a different account. Any payment that is not for the exact amount of the trade, to the details shown inside it, is not the trade’s payment. Do not.
A link to "the escrow"
The deal moves to a site the seller sent. That is a fake escrow. The real one is the site you typed yourself.
Pressure in the chat
"Confirm now", "cancel and we redo it", "support says". None of it changes the state of the trade. Only the trade does.
Cash and fake bills
Escrow confirms the trade, not the cash. Count before confirming.
Goods that are not what you ordered
For products, escrow protects the payment, not the quality. Describe what you are buying precisely; the arbiter reads the description.
Honest limit: if you sent money to a person outside any escrow, no platform can get it back. See I sent a bank transfer or PIX for crypto and got nothing.