Are you familiar with a company out of austria that has the url of
escrow-union.com?  They claim to be an escrow company for internet
auctions,

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Request for Question Clarification by bobbie7-ga on 02 Aug 2002 16:28 PDT

Hi
What exactly do you want to know?

Hello,

I’m not familiar with the company and did a few routine checks.
I did a searches at Google with no results or entry
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=escrow-union.com+&btnG=Google+Search
Altavista.com
http://uk.altavista.com/q?pg=q&q=escrow-union.com&kl=XX&search.x=31&search.y=14&what=web
Alltheweb.com
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf-8&l=any&q=escrow-union.com
Yahoo.com
http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=escrow-union.com&hc=0&hs=0
Excite.com
http://msxml.excite.com/_1_3MVBUMN02M6UTHF__info.xcite/dog/results?otmpl=dog/webresults.htm&qkw=escrow-union.com&qcat=web&start=&ver=27882
all with no results, so they haven't submitted their site to the major
search engines.
I did a 'smartwhois' search on their domain name and their ISP is in
Hong Kong (rather strange for an Austrian company) and the domain name
was only created on July 19th 2002 so they appear to have had less
than a months online presence with this domain name.
Network Solutions
http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=escrow-union.com&STRING2.x=19&STRING2.y=15&SearchType=do
I performed a search at
An Austrian website for Austrian contact details
Compnet
http://www.compnet.at/contact/
Using their contact address details:
Escrow Union, Inc.
Margaretenstraße 25/9, A-1040 Wien, Austria 
( http://escrow-union.com/company.html )
and searched 'Wien' the location of the company with no results
Another interesting fact is in their 'Terms of Use - the service' on
page
http://escrow-union.com/terms.html of their web site
"This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of Spain."

For an Austrian company to be incorporated it has 'AG' or 'GmbH' after
it's name:
"As a legal entity, a company comes into existence upon registration
in the commercial register. To form a company, an agreement of
incorporation (for a GmbH) must be drawn up in German and has to be
filed with the Commercial Court. For an AG, all founders need to sign
the Articles of Association before a Notary.”
source: Dr. F. Schwank Law Offices Vienna
http://www.schwank.com/english/f_comp/com_cont.htm

The only major auction site in Europe is ebay (Yahoo seem to have
pulled out of the European market) and ebay use Escrow.com as their
partner
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/escrow.html

So from the above information, the profile is of a very new online
company (less than 4 weeks old) which ‘may’ have been incorporated out
of Austria due to the absence of AG or GmbH after it’s name, with
hosting in Hong Kong and contractual terms governed by the laws of
Spain. There could be a perfectly logical explanation for this, and
there probably is, but as a person who is unfamiliar, it sends some
strange messages.

Search Strategy:
austrian incorporation company
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=austrian+incorporation+company&btnG=Google+Search

I hope that helps,
regards
lot-ga

hi,

eBay does not actually use Escrow.com everywhere in Europe.
in Italy, they recommend a service called Escrow-Europa:

http://pages.ebay.it/help/community/escrow.html

QXL does, too

http://www.qxl.com/isroot/html/IT/jump/escrow.shtml


rgds,

Massimo