mumu
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Escrowly cloned Escrow.com's website, faked their reviews, and got caught doing it twice. Here's the receipts.
I said I'd write about the next one, and this one didn't even take long to fall apart. Escrowly is a new crypto escrow company that started running ads on this very forum. A member flagged it, and once people actually started looking, the whole thing unraveled in real time, in the thread, with the company's own rep watching it happen.
Let's start with the basics. Escrowly's website is a near-identical copy of Escrow.com's, down to the exact dollar amount used in the example transaction on the homepage. Not a similar layout, not "inspired by." The same numbers. If you're building a company whose entire pitch is "trust us with your money," maybe don't open by copy-pasting the homepage of the company that's spent decades earning that trust.
Then there's the WHOIS contact. A Gmail address. For a company asking people to route their money through it. Escrow.com has been in this business for over 20 years and somehow still doesn't need a free consumer email account to receive legal correspondence.
Here's where it gets good. Escrowly's site and social posts describe them as a "regulated digital asset escrow platform," and they cite being "registered with FinCEN as an MSB" as their credential. Except MSB registration is a same-day federal filing. No vetting, no license issued, nothing. It is not the same thing as the actual state money transmitter licenses that let a company legally hold escrow funds, which is exactly what Escrow.com lists out by name, by state, on their own site. Escrowly just says "regulated" and moves on, hoping nobody asks the follow-up question. Someone did. To their credit, their rep showed up in the thread and admitted MSB registration isn't a license and said they'd fix the wording. Fine. Good start.
Except then someone checked the reviews.
Escrowly's homepage advertises a 4.9 rating with "100's of reviews." The actual TrustPilot page it's supposedly pulling from shows 4.0 stars from a grand total of 4 reviews. Four. Not four hundred. Four.
And then, the best part. After one fake-looking testimonial got called out publicly, Escrowly's site didn't remove it. It swapped out the name and the photo and kept the exact same review text, word for word. Same sentence structure, same specific phrasing, brand new fictional customer wearing it like a costume. That's not a bug, that's a testimonial factory getting caught mid-shift change.
While we're doing a site audit: there's a chart on their homepage with dots and a random "$7.20 in April" that means literally nothing to anyone looking at it. There's a "Simple Dispute Resolution" banner that links nowhere. There's an app download link that goes nowhere when clicked. And there's a "Powered by Verisign" Norton Secured seal, a badge design that hasn't been in active use for over a decade, sitting there unlinked, when a real Norton Secured seal is supposed to link out to an actual verification page showing the scan results. It's a trust badge that trusts you not to click it.
So to recap the sales pitch: a cloned website, an inflated rating pulled from four total reviews, recycled fake testimonials, dead links dressed up as features, and a security seal that's been retired since before some of the crypto this platform runs on existed. All of this to save you approximately nothing, since multiple people in the thread pointed out the fees come out about the same as just using the company they copied.
The NP's mod team said the ads went up after members reported successful transactions, before any of this surfaced, and that they'd "keep an eye on it." Sure. In the meantime the thread climbed to the top of page two, which someone dryly noted meant the advertising technically worked, just not in the direction anyone was hoping for.
I don't know if Escrowly is an outright scam or just a very young company that got dangerously overconfident with a design template and a testimonials page. What I do know is that if your entire pitch rests on "trust us with your money," faking the one thing that's supposed to build that trust is a strange place to start.
In my previous experience with Doma, at least there was some confidence that led me to pay some dollars to try their scam system. With Escrowly, I have not, will not, and do not have the confidence to do that. I hope you have an answer.
Screenshots of the cloned site, the swapped reviews, and the dead links all live in the original thread for anyone who wants to check the receipts themselves.
I said I'd write about the next one, and this one didn't even take long to fall apart. Escrowly is a new crypto escrow company that started running ads on this very forum. A member flagged it, and once people actually started looking, the whole thing unraveled in real time, in the thread, with the company's own rep watching it happen.
Let's start with the basics. Escrowly's website is a near-identical copy of Escrow.com's, down to the exact dollar amount used in the example transaction on the homepage. Not a similar layout, not "inspired by." The same numbers. If you're building a company whose entire pitch is "trust us with your money," maybe don't open by copy-pasting the homepage of the company that's spent decades earning that trust.
Then there's the WHOIS contact. A Gmail address. For a company asking people to route their money through it. Escrow.com has been in this business for over 20 years and somehow still doesn't need a free consumer email account to receive legal correspondence.
Here's where it gets good. Escrowly's site and social posts describe them as a "regulated digital asset escrow platform," and they cite being "registered with FinCEN as an MSB" as their credential. Except MSB registration is a same-day federal filing. No vetting, no license issued, nothing. It is not the same thing as the actual state money transmitter licenses that let a company legally hold escrow funds, which is exactly what Escrow.com lists out by name, by state, on their own site. Escrowly just says "regulated" and moves on, hoping nobody asks the follow-up question. Someone did. To their credit, their rep showed up in the thread and admitted MSB registration isn't a license and said they'd fix the wording. Fine. Good start.
Except then someone checked the reviews.
Escrowly's homepage advertises a 4.9 rating with "100's of reviews." The actual TrustPilot page it's supposedly pulling from shows 4.0 stars from a grand total of 4 reviews. Four. Not four hundred. Four.
And then, the best part. After one fake-looking testimonial got called out publicly, Escrowly's site didn't remove it. It swapped out the name and the photo and kept the exact same review text, word for word. Same sentence structure, same specific phrasing, brand new fictional customer wearing it like a costume. That's not a bug, that's a testimonial factory getting caught mid-shift change.
While we're doing a site audit: there's a chart on their homepage with dots and a random "$7.20 in April" that means literally nothing to anyone looking at it. There's a "Simple Dispute Resolution" banner that links nowhere. There's an app download link that goes nowhere when clicked. And there's a "Powered by Verisign" Norton Secured seal, a badge design that hasn't been in active use for over a decade, sitting there unlinked, when a real Norton Secured seal is supposed to link out to an actual verification page showing the scan results. It's a trust badge that trusts you not to click it.
So to recap the sales pitch: a cloned website, an inflated rating pulled from four total reviews, recycled fake testimonials, dead links dressed up as features, and a security seal that's been retired since before some of the crypto this platform runs on existed. All of this to save you approximately nothing, since multiple people in the thread pointed out the fees come out about the same as just using the company they copied.
The NP's mod team said the ads went up after members reported successful transactions, before any of this surfaced, and that they'd "keep an eye on it." Sure. In the meantime the thread climbed to the top of page two, which someone dryly noted meant the advertising technically worked, just not in the direction anyone was hoping for.
I don't know if Escrowly is an outright scam or just a very young company that got dangerously overconfident with a design template and a testimonials page. What I do know is that if your entire pitch rests on "trust us with your money," faking the one thing that's supposed to build that trust is a strange place to start.
In my previous experience with Doma, at least there was some confidence that led me to pay some dollars to try their scam system. With Escrowly, I have not, will not, and do not have the confidence to do that. I hope you have an answer.
Screenshots of the cloned site, the swapped reviews, and the dead links all live in the original thread for anyone who wants to check the receipts themselves.
