A listener wrote to me to tell me about a problem they're facing.

Okay, check this out. They went to buy a house, right? And when you go to buy a house,

there's like a little dance that everyone does. Like, do you give them the money first or do they give you the deed first and the

keys or do you do like a quick swap at the same time? What if it's a phony check or the deed is made up?

This is where escrow comes in.

Both a seller and buyer hand their things to a third party, someone that both sides trust and waits for everything to clear.

If the check clears and the deed is valid, then escrow says, okay, the deal is done and gives

the money to the seller and the keys to the buyer.

So this guy, a listener of mine, says, he bought a house and during this process he gave $250,000 to the escrow company. But then someone scammed the escrow company. They

posed as the seller and said, hey, could you just deposit the money into our bank account directly?

And escrow's like, oh yeah, of course, no problem.

We do this all the time.

Here you go.

And they deposited the $250,000 into the scammers account instead of the actual seller.

But here's the crazy part.

Because the seller never got the money, escrow wouldn't give the keys to the buyer.

They were being jerks about it.

They were trying to say, oh, sorry, we lost the money, no house for you, the deal has been cancelled. And the buyer's like, whoa, no, no, that's what escrow is for. You're our

trusted third party. We trusted you to do this deal. You screwed up and that's not our problem, that's yours.

But escrow's like, no.

I never got an update on what happened here and if this got resolved.

I think the buyer took escrow to court to try to get their money back.

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