Update: After publishing this article, I heard from Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie (Freelancer is the parent company of Escrow.com). Matt told me the information in the article is incorrect, and these countries were added to the “do not service” list in error.
Matt’s full statement to me is here:
“The article is erroneous – we do service those countries listed today.
We updated our compliance processes yesterday and moved a few countries to a higher risk category in the database, which seems to have auto-populated the website for our “do not service” list which is incorrect and we are getting corrected immediately.
To be clear, we continue to support China and Israel.
The only restriction that I am aware of in that list is that there is a total goods embargo BETWEEN the countries of Turkey and Israel currently.”
Escrow.com maintains a list of countries / regions from which it does not support payments. Buyers and sellers in these regions can not receive payments or disburse to bank accounts from these countries. In 2019, Escrow.com made some waves when it added Russia and the US state of Alabama to this list. Since then, the state of Alabama seems to have been removed from this list.
In its most recent update, Escrow.com added 18 countries/regions to its list of countries not supported by Escrow.com. The two countries that stood out the most to me are Israel and China. I know of many domain registrants who live in these two countries, and I also know there are many businesses in these two countries that acquire and use high value domain names.
This means a domain name buyer based in China or Israel will not be able to use Escrow.com to purchase a domain name if the funds originate from a domestic bank in either of those countries. A buyer would need to open a bank account in another region and pay or receive payment to that bank in order to use Escrow.com for a transaction. No reason was given by Escrow.com for adding any of these countries to this list.
The entire list of countries / regions that are not supported by Escrow.com are listed below with the yellow highlight for countries that were just added to the list:
- Afghanistan
- Algeria
- Angola
- Azerbaijan
- Belarus
- Burkina Faso
- Bulgaria
- Burundi
- Cambodia
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- China
- Congo
- Côte d’Ivoire
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Egypt
- Eritrea
- Equatorial Guinea
- Ethiopia
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Iraq
- Israel
- Kazakhstan
- Kenya
- Kyrgyzstan
- Lao People’s Democratic Republic
- Lebanon
- Liberia
- Libya
- Mali
- Moldova
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Nicaragua
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Panama
- Philippines
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Africa
- Sudan
- Sri Lanka
- Suriname
- Tajikistan
- Tanzania
- Turkey
- Uganda
- Ukraine
- Uzbekistan
- Venezuela
- Vietnam
- Yemen
- Zimbabwe
Thank you to David Clements for sharing this with me.
This is huge. China accounts for a sizeable amount of transactions on escrow.com
There are probably a lot of jurisdictions in which Escrow.com does not have relevant licensing to do business with customers there.
It is one thing for Escrow.com to point out that they are licensed in every US state, but that doesn’t mean they are licensed everywhere.
Taking Israel, for example… just this month the Bank of Israel sanctioned a number of banking operations there for non-compliance with relevant money laundering and other regulations – including Citibank’s operations there. Citigroup is the largest foreign-owned banking operation IN Israel, and if they got onto the Bank of Israel’s radar along with a number of others, then it is not hard to imagine that Escrow.com transactions may have also been fish in that net, making Israel a high risk jurisdiction in which to offer their services.
It is also the case that different jurisdictions may have rules concerning transfers which are not compatible with Escrow.com operations.
For example, the State of California requires licensed escrow operators to maintain a reserve fund to deal with losses resulting from chargebacks of credit card and ACH transactions, in the amount of 10% of their average monthly transaction load of those types. While the California statute is specific to credit card and ACH transactions, it appears that some jurisdictions allow wire transfers to be recalled under a broader range of circumstances than those used to the US banking system may be familiar. If you add that to things like bankruptcy clawback provisions and other sorts of exceptions to what are usually no-recourse payment mechanisms, there can be a long list of reasons why a jurisdiction ends up being “high risk” as far as Escrow.com operations are concerned.
We need decentralized bitcoin escrow services
Matt Barrie here from Escrow.
This article is completely erroneous.
Of course we have not blocked China and Israel..
Please remove this article and issue a correction.
I would have thought you would contact us to fact check before publication.
I would have thought the information posted on your website – which is what was reported – would be accurate in the first place.
You should accept responsibility for someone accurately reporting what your own site instead of making a snide comment about the accurate reporting of your own erroneous information.