I'm not entirely convinced this is actually an escrow scam attempt.  From reading what Tedfrost wrote, he sounds more like a confused newbie who doesn't know what escrow is and doesn't trust people--which is a perfectly acceptable sentiment in the world of crypto.  He sounds like he doesn't have any experience in trading crypto for fiat and doesn't know what we normally do around here

In addition, escrow is useless with PayPal anyway.

Then again, I could be completely wrong and Tedfrost could be a cunning scammer posing as an inexperienced noob, but I'm not sure that's the case here.