I'm thinking out loud here, but does the escrow necessarily need to be a third party?
What if I want to trade with a higher trust alt of the person instead? I would imagine that people would pay extra for that privilege.
Even if you do use a third party that is a different physical person that person could still collude with the other person and scam you.
The problem is that the seller and escrow must not collude.
Does it really make a difference if they are the same person? it might increase the risk they collude but even that is kind of hard to say.
To be fair if you agree to use someone as escrow it means you trust him enough to be willing to send first to him. Therefore the risk it not significantly (if at all) increased.
However it's not transparent at all. If any problem arises (and I mean non-intentional problems due to miscommunication, not necessarily a scam attempt) then the escrow (who is an alt of the other party) can't act neutral, he just can't. If the 2 persons who are dealing forget to agree what to do on an specific circumstance each of them may think differently; I've seen cases when they assume completely different things as obvious. A neutral third party could solve this but in this case there's no third party to do it.
As a result I don't think that's a scammy behavior completely (so I don't think it's enough for a trusted negative feedback) but I'd absolutely prefer to use someone else's services as escrow.
Looks like BayAreaCoins left QS deserved negative trust.
QS has said that anyone who leaves him negative trust (BayAreaCoins) will be removed from Default Trust.
Let's see what happens.
And on TC's profile too. It's quite strange to see someone on DT level one with a trusted (by default) negative feedback. I'm curious to see what happens too.