OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
It’s been close to a year since Escrow.com introduced the Know Your Customer (KYC) Verification process to all Buyers, Sellers and Brokers. The process has not been all roses but it seems to be working now.
Escrow.com believes that this verification requirement has helped make its platform that much more secure and overall, more transactions have completed successfully.
My account manager has been very helpful with various issues, including helping a few of my buyers get verified and with 2 of the Escrow.com special services:
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Domain Concierge Service (For domains without content)
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Domain Name Holding (Payment plans for a domain)
I have actually used both these services in the past 3 months.
Here are some updates Escrow.com shared and are relevant to your future transactions:
1. Display Names – Sellers may be required to ‘change their display name’ when it comes time to disburse their funds. For example, if a Seller would like to be disbursed to their own personal account ‘John Smith’, but their display name in their Escrow profile says ‘COMPANY INC’, they will need to change their display name to ‘John Smith’. Sellers can only be paid to an account which matches their display name.
2. Receiving Funds From Third Parties – If a Buyer is using a third party to fund a transaction (for example: relative, business partner, outside company not mentioned in their customer profile), the Buyer will need to declare how they are related to the third party, and the third party will need to setup an Escrow.com account and complete the required tier verification. Escrow.com is frequently audited which is why we are required to verify the identities of all individuals making payments on our platform.
3. KYC Tier Verification – How are we doing with this? We are always happy to hear about further suggestions on how to make the process more user-friendly from your point of view. Does it make you feel more secure? Are there areas you would like to see improved? Please share your valuable feedback.
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Hello,
You are doing a great job but I do not know if anyone ever told you that your blog’s fonts are too small. I believe making changes would help readers. It strains the eyes. I visit other blogs too and I have never seen any blog use this kind of fonts.
Please make it larger enough to accommodate everyone.
Thank you.
Thanks for your input.
What about now?
That guy must be using a phone? I just adjust to suit on desktop.
The one thing that often is very inconvenient, however, is the expanding header feature. I would turn that off because it can often get messy and time consuming to deal with it when you just want to check to see what’s new or scroll down to a known post.
It also activates at the craziest unpredictable times when you’re on the page and your mouse pointer is not even anywhere near the header, like just now.
Hi Konstantinos,
Great article. I’m a regular reader of your site. However, I’ve never posted a comment until today. I’m not sure if you were paid to write this article. That said, Escrow.com is one of the worst companies in the world. Search online for “escrow.com reviews.” It is going to be difficult to ever find any “genuine” positive review about escrow.com. Since the company was sold about 3 years ago to a company based out of Australia. Their service has been going downhill ever since.
I wish there is a better company out there. Take for example, what is stopping escrow.com from telling their customers they do NOT accept ACH? They never post the instruction in a way their clients can understand. What escrow.com does instead is to accept the fund and later refund the money back to the client’s account. If you are domain seller, you risk losing a sale. There are so many other horror stories you’d find online.
My advice to anyone is to avoid escrow.com like a plague. I can’t wait for a time when another company would come to disrupt their business and provide better service to customers. Bad companies like escrow.com cannot survive. One day one day, escrow.com will be out of business.
Best,
Kikie
Um, how have you not heard of PayoneerEscrow.com? It replaced Escrow.com a year or so ago. It’s been all over NamePros.com as the best escrow company now.
Where’ve you been? Under a rock? :O)
Not replaced. Payoneer is a competitor of escrow.con.
Thanks for posting Kiki. Yes there have been a number of blog threads these past months re exactly what you are talking about concerning Escrow.com and it’s great and shocking decline. But then it seems people forget and need to be reminded. Plus some still take their ad money, which I don’t fault at all for those who do, however. Many people have posted about this too. Keep up the good work because the industry has suffered because of this including no doubt many of us personally. Furthermore, while this particular kind of “verification” business appears to be sold as some kind of great big legal requirement, it appears to me to either be nothing but Escrow.com’s own little internal company requirement instead, or perhaps at most a requirement of the laws of Australia only. I have never seen a single shred of evidence presented otherwise, but I’ve seen plenty of the appearance of making it sound like it is something “required.”
And as for you, Konstantinos, I see you did not wish to address my report above. It happened again when visiting this thread now. Okay, don’t address it if you want. I still like your blog. For now. But that issue blows. 🙂 😉
Are you talking about the header? Sorry but I can’t remove my navigation menu. And I don’t understand what the problem is…
Both escrow.com and payoneer are doing this verification. They may have different procedures but this a US requirement.
I joined Payoneer not all that long ago while the Escrow.com “verification” requirement had already been well in full swing. They required no such thing at all. Even their terms only stated that they “may” require some items at some point. And their bank verification process was the best I’d ever encountered. In fact, they did not even require the method of verifying small deposits, which takes days. All they did was take the bank information and then much to my surprised an email came perhaps no more than 30 minutes later saying everything was verified, apparently remotely.
So I am still not buying any claim that the Escrow.com requirement is a US requirement at all, and I still have not seen any credible evidence that it is. Perhaps it is, but I haven’t seen it yet and only experienced the above.
As for your navigation header, what was not clear about what I wrote? It pops up all over the place when you don’t want it to, even when you’re already scrolled well below it, fills up the screen and requires a time consuming hassle to get closed. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me, and I’m on a desktop with a “normal” size monitor and use very normal software.
OS? Browser and version?
I thought you might ask that stuff, but I don’t want to say all that here. If I feel up to it, I’ll make a screen shot or two next time it happens that way and then post it on one of those free image posting sites. In the meantime I’ll just deal I have been. Could be worse.
However, I’m more interested in getting to the bottom of the Escrow.com thing. Would love to know who says it’s a US requirement, who can prove it, and if Payoneer is really doing the same thing now despite my experience above. Still not convinced the Escrow.com requirement is any US requirement at all.
Send me an email.
Payoneer told me at Nameson 2017 they are doing KYC as well.
Hey John – there’s this cool thing called “Google”. If you used it you might discover that KYC (know your customer) underlies many anti-money laundering regulations in countries around the world. From another cool thing called “Wikipedia”:
“Enhanced due diligence (EDD) is a more detailed standard required for larger customers and transactions. The USA PATRIOT Act dictates that institutions “shall establish appropriate, specific, and, where necessary, enhanced, due diligence policies, procedures, and controls that are reasonably designed to detect and report instances of money laundering through those accounts.”[10] US regulations require that EDD measures are applied to account types such as Private banking, Correspondent account, and Offshore banking institutions. Because regulatory definitions are neither globally consistent nor prescriptive, financial institutions are at risk of being held to differing standards dependent upon their jurisdiction and regulatory environment. An article published by Peter Warrack in the July 2006 edition of ACAMS Today (Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists) suggests the following: “A rigorous and robust process of investigation over and above (KYC) procedures, that seeks with reasonable assurance to verify and validate the customer’s identity; understand and test the customer’s profile, business and account activity; identify relevant adverse information and risk; assess the potential for money laundering and / or terrorist financing to support actionable decisions to mitigate against financial, regulatory and reputational risk and ensure regulatory compliance.”
So, Escrow.com is obviously using KYC and EDD for CYA purposes. Payoneer willl likely end up doing the same eventually. Give it time. Don’t like it? Blame criminal money launderers and terrorist financiers.
Okay, fair enough. And that leaves this part of the matter now (see Kiki above):
> “That said, Escrow.com is one of the worst companies in the world. Search online for “escrow.com reviews.” It is going to be difficult to ever find any “genuine” positive review about escrow.com. Since the company was sold about 3 years ago to a company based out of Australia. Their service has been going downhill ever since.”
That sums up my experience as well, and clearly that of numerous others who have posted about it in the blogs (and NP?) too, no doubt many who have not posted.
So whether it’s KYC, CYA, or finger licking good KFC (don’t go near it, frying oils are super super bad for you), it’s anything *but* Escrow.com for me anymore. Under Brandon Abbey and friends it was one of the best gold standards in the industry for years, but how sad the fall of a great domain.