❓ Before you trade

I paid and the seller won't release my crypto. What now?

What you can do when you already sent the money and the other side went quiet, is asking you to cancel, or says the payment never arrived.


First the honest part. If you paid someone directly (bank transfer, PIX, cash) and nothing was held in escrow, there is no button that gets your money back: a bank transfer is not reversible by asking, and the only road is a police report and your bank's fraud desk. If the trade was inside an escrow, the situation is completely different, because the seller's crypto was locked before you paid and the seller cannot take it back by going quiet.

If the seller asks you to cancel the order after you paid

Never cancel. On most P2P platforms cancelling releases the seller's crypto back to them while your money stays in their bank account. On iEscrow this trick does not exist: once a trade has been accepted, nobody can cancel it, not the buyer, not the seller. The only exits are a confirmed payment, a dispute decided by an arbiter, or an expired window.

What happens on iEscrow when the seller stays quiet

  1. 1When you declare that you paid, the seller gets a 30-minute window to confirm they received the money.
  2. 2From 15 minutes after your declaration you can open a dispute yourself if the seller is stalling. The trade freezes: nobody can release or refund on their own.
  3. 3If the seller lets the 30 minutes pass without confirming or disputing, the trade escalates to a dispute automatically. Silence never returns the crypto to the seller.
  4. 4An arbiter reviews what both sides submit: your real transfer receipt (amount, date, destination) against the seller’s account activity. The decision is binary: the crypto goes to you, or back to the seller, with the reason in writing.
Your strongest evidence is the receipt from your bank app with the operation number. The amount is the key: on iEscrow every trade has a unique exact amount, so a payment for that exact figure is hard to confuse with anything else.

Why this cannot turn into "your word against theirs"

The seller's crypto left their balance when the trade was accepted and sits in escrow under iEscrow's custody. The seller does not hold it, so they cannot sell it twice or disappear with it. What is being decided is only whether your payment arrived, and that is a question with a receipt.

If someone claiming to be "support" writes to you in a chat or on Telegram telling you to cancel, to send more money, or to move funds to a "safe" address: that is the scam. iEscrow support never contacts you first and never gives you an address. See Official channels.
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