Personally, I have never dealt with escrows officially, but I have transactions with them because of the charity. The escrow is bL4nkcode for the
Bitcointalk Charity. So he is holding a lot of money now for the charity, and he is in control of it. So for the amount of money needed for my activity, I gave the necessary things for the budget and let it be approved. That's how we conducted it. So in a way, I did deal with escrows.
When I haven't had any idea about escrows, this was the early stage of my forum activity. You could see that I have transacted with this profile.
Druckao -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=916600And then, without any idea, I didn't look at the feedbacks that he has back then, and I didn't have any backup plan in case he didn't pay. So I just "trusted" him with it and used the code that was supposed to be sold. It sucks to be scammed. So after that lesson, I learned more about trust and understood what things should be done to get scammed.
So yes, there are still scams that could happen to you when you don't know anything about it, and it's better to be aware and safe to use a "reputable" escrow for your transactions. Csmiami pretty much went on point about how the escrow here works, so you are more knowledgeable now, OP. Use it to your advantage and not get scammed.