I don't see how escrowing for himself would be a scam, unless he's tacking on an extra escrow fee and making the other party pay it.
Isn't this exactly what escrows do? Doesn't the buyer always pay the escrow fee? Isn't the point of an escrow to have a neutral third party in a deal between two people? Isn't the idea that the escrow is secretely one of the deal partners a direct perversion of this?
Even then there would be much more effective ways to scam such as, well, simply walking away with the entire escrow amount.
Arguing that there are more effective ways to scam doesn't make the less "effective" scam OK.
From the outside it might seem a little shady, but you have to consider the fact that he's a highly trusted member and very effective scam-buster.
Is he actually a "very effective scam-buster" or is he a bully that has a reputation for a hot-temper? Where are the cases where he's actually been the one to do some scam busting that wasn't already done by another party? I've seen that he quickly echoes the negative feedback of one party or another in disputes, often with the effect that the neg-repped party starts claiming "unfair and why is this guy allowed to do this to me"? But it's not very clear to me that his escalation of disputes between others his a help to the marketplace. We've seen that he bullies like a school-yard king but I don't see what that's actualy doing to help people. We've seen him neg-rep people for simply refusing to use his services (see the case of worhipper_-_), we've seen him neg-rep people falsely and then stick to his guns about it until absolute irrefutable proof is provided (despite the fact that logic was against his accusations all along (see the case of ndnhc), we've seen him use alts and his default trust status seemingly for fun to neg-rep people merely for personal dislike (my case), and to troll with alts (see the accounts FunFunnyFan, ACCTSeller, and look, just two posts upthread he's using Panthers52 to talk about "anal lube"---this is your guy, you support him right?). But where are these mountains of good that he must be doing in order to make up for all the trails of scorched earth that he leaves in his wake?
Even more to the point, don't you think there are other forum members out there with more balanced, better tempered personalites People who don't have penchants for mockery and personal grudges? People without track records of shady behavior? Aren't the the kind of people you should be putting in your trust list?
As such it's only natural that he would make a lot of enemies from people whose intentions may not be totally above-board to begin with. So if, for instance, QS saw a deal for widgets in the Marketplace section that he couldn't pass up, but he knew that ordering widgets would potentially expose him to the sort of people previously referred to, it's only logical that he might use an alt to abstract himself.
It's also ethical for him to use some other escrow while making deals with that alt. That much seems quite clear to me.
tspacepilot, I like you, man. I think you bring to the forum a certain level of quality and content that most users sorely lack. Furthermore, I do not think QS's rating for you is totally necessary.
Then why do you have me PM blocked? The previous incarnation of you having QS on your trust list, you had him remove the negative and you sent me a paragraph which you had him read in which you told him that you expected all of his ratings to be above board and without personal animus and to give people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. It seems like you've come a long way from that.
However, I feel that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, so to speak. As I've said before, I'd rather have a few people butthurt than 10 times as many scammed.
I'm not sure your 10-to-1 ratio has any basis in fact. But, what's more, I'm not sure that I'd describe honest people being bullied off the forums by a hothead as nothing more than "butthurt", it seems more serious than that to me. I'd go further and say that if you allow the bully to run rampant and smear who he likes, you may find after a while that there aren't a lot left of these "little children" for him to protect.
So basically I'd file this accusation in the "big flippin deal" bucket.
I'm pretty shocked by this assesment. I don't know what else to say about that.