I was approached recently, by someone offering to buy one of my domains.
They offered a huge amount, much much more than I was then showing in my whois info at the time. When I looked up the person's name shown in the email, it was a person who was closely connected to a reasonably famous person (someone who wasn't short of many, many millions) and someone who was a public figure in a particular sector. The domain from where the email was sent from went to this person's website, so all seemed legitimate. I accepted the offer and they sent me a contract, which looked fine.
I was then sent an email and invoice/demand for payment, which seemed to be from escrow.com and which said that I had to pay for 50% of the commission in advance (I had agreed to split the commission). Given the amount they had offered, this 50% amount wasn't huge (although it was still sizeable) and so while I was in the middle of preparing to send the money, I thought I would check on escrow.com to see to the status of the deal and if the buyer had sent the funds. My account on escrow.com showed no transactions.
I then looked again at the contract and also, the banking details submitted by the buyer and this is when I realised that this is almost certainly a scam. The contract showed multiple signatures where the buyer had signed, but which was not easy to see unless you zoomed in a lot on the document. The bank account which I was to deposit the commission to was in another business name and certainly not escrow.com, with an address located in a residential street.
I called escrow.com to ask them if it was normal for them to ask the seller to pay the commission charges upfront and they said "We never ask this". "We always deduct any commission from the buyer's proceeds".
The emails I received that pretended to be from escrow.com were very well made and very convincing.
And so just to be sure that this was indeed a scam, I reached out to a specialist in domain law and they came back telling me this was 100% a scam. I did not lose any money but they had me going for a while.
My puzzlement was how the scammers expected someone to send money to a business name that wasn't in the name of escrow.com and also, that the account holder was located in a residential street. Yes, businesses can be located in regular homes, but not one of the size and which has a high profile name as escrow.com.
