Hi all,
I wanted to share a recent horror story I'm currently living with escrow.com.
I closed a transaction on December 1st and I'm still waiting to receive my funds weeks later. When I set up the wire instructions, I included information in the "Wire Memo" field that my bank absolutely requires in order to be able to credit my account. It turns out that escrow.com forgot about this and sent the wire without any such instructions. Although this field appears on the end user UI when creating the wire and it is saved properly for later recall, the customer support team apparently can't see it (and neither did the payments team). The wire got returned to escrow by my bank, but escrow seems to be clueless about this.
The core problem here is that the customer service team is overseas and they claim to have *no way whatsoever* to get directly in touch with the Payments Team that is directly responsible for handling this. The lack of communication is astounding: all they can do is email the payments team and request a response, but the Payment Team apparently takes days to respond, and the information they get back seems to be limited at best.
For example, the mislabeled wire arrived at my bank on the 7th. I spoke with my bank on the 9th, who confirmed that they had received money in the amount expected but that the wire would need to be amended to include the correct information so it could be released to me. I called back Escrow later on the 9th and told them this, and they said that they'd work on it.
It apparently took escrow.com support people until the 12th to "email" the amendment request details to their bank. They also claimed to have sent another email on the 15th. On the 16th, they said that they finally submitted the amendment to Bank of America.
I called back on the 16th asking what was up. The rep said that the amendment was sent and that I could "call Bank of America" if I had further questions, but without giving any contact information for BofA...and later giving me a BofA phone number that was just their regular phone banking number. *I* need to navigate through a giant bank's phone tree to try to find out the status of something that was not my mistake? (I tried many ways to get in touch with Bank of America, but I was never successful in finding a department that could give me any information...not that I'd expect them to talk to me anyway, since I'm not even their direct customer.)
I finally checked in with my bank again on the 21st, and I found out that my bank had actually returned the wire (for lack of sufficient information) to escrow.com way back on the 12th! So it turns out that escrow was spending all of this time trying to amend a wire that had already been returned, that escrow.com didn't even start that amendment process until after it was returned, and that no one on the support team was ever aware of this returned wire until I told them.
Since the 21st, I've been trying to get the customer service team to talk to the payments team to simply confirm that the wire was returned, so that they could later, maybe, eventually possibly initiate the process to resend another one out. It seems like this would be simple, but no luck so far. All they can do is send emails and hope for a response from the other team, and who knows how long that will take.
Anyway, this is getting a little ridiculous. Does *anyone* know how to get in touch with the Payments Team directly? Shouldn't "paying out funds" be one of the core competencies of an escrow company, and shouldn't the support and payments teams be better connected? @Jackson Elsegood ?
Thanks!
-S
I wanted to share a recent horror story I'm currently living with escrow.com.
I closed a transaction on December 1st and I'm still waiting to receive my funds weeks later. When I set up the wire instructions, I included information in the "Wire Memo" field that my bank absolutely requires in order to be able to credit my account. It turns out that escrow.com forgot about this and sent the wire without any such instructions. Although this field appears on the end user UI when creating the wire and it is saved properly for later recall, the customer support team apparently can't see it (and neither did the payments team). The wire got returned to escrow by my bank, but escrow seems to be clueless about this.
The core problem here is that the customer service team is overseas and they claim to have *no way whatsoever* to get directly in touch with the Payments Team that is directly responsible for handling this. The lack of communication is astounding: all they can do is email the payments team and request a response, but the Payment Team apparently takes days to respond, and the information they get back seems to be limited at best.
For example, the mislabeled wire arrived at my bank on the 7th. I spoke with my bank on the 9th, who confirmed that they had received money in the amount expected but that the wire would need to be amended to include the correct information so it could be released to me. I called back Escrow later on the 9th and told them this, and they said that they'd work on it.
It apparently took escrow.com support people until the 12th to "email" the amendment request details to their bank. They also claimed to have sent another email on the 15th. On the 16th, they said that they finally submitted the amendment to Bank of America.
I called back on the 16th asking what was up. The rep said that the amendment was sent and that I could "call Bank of America" if I had further questions, but without giving any contact information for BofA...and later giving me a BofA phone number that was just their regular phone banking number. *I* need to navigate through a giant bank's phone tree to try to find out the status of something that was not my mistake? (I tried many ways to get in touch with Bank of America, but I was never successful in finding a department that could give me any information...not that I'd expect them to talk to me anyway, since I'm not even their direct customer.)
I finally checked in with my bank again on the 21st, and I found out that my bank had actually returned the wire (for lack of sufficient information) to escrow.com way back on the 12th! So it turns out that escrow was spending all of this time trying to amend a wire that had already been returned, that escrow.com didn't even start that amendment process until after it was returned, and that no one on the support team was ever aware of this returned wire until I told them.
Since the 21st, I've been trying to get the customer service team to talk to the payments team to simply confirm that the wire was returned, so that they could later, maybe, eventually possibly initiate the process to resend another one out. It seems like this would be simple, but no luck so far. All they can do is send emails and hope for a response from the other team, and who knows how long that will take.
Anyway, this is getting a little ridiculous. Does *anyone* know how to get in touch with the Payments Team directly? Shouldn't "paying out funds" be one of the core competencies of an escrow company, and shouldn't the support and payments teams be better connected? @Jackson Elsegood ?
Thanks!
-S