When you buy a piece of property in Costa Rica, you will likely wire money from your home country bank to a Costa Rica escrow service. This can be quick and easy, or it can be a major pain in the neck. Life used to be so easy before terrorism… and drug running… and global economic crisis… and climate change and…
Funny thing, we used to find things to complain about, even before all this wonkiness in the world. Had we only known then what we know now.
It has gotten a bit dicey moving money around this planet. There is the off chance that you might be laundering some drug money, setting up to fund an attack of some kind, or generally not doing things just right, so there are safeguards.
For years we have used a rather casual system here in Costa Rica by which lots of land was bought & sold. Buyers generally put 10% of the purchase price of a piece of property into escrow while we real estate guys and the lawyers went about being duly diligent making sure that the property was what it claimed to be. That money was put into what we called an “escrow” account.
Well, as it turns out, those escrow accounts were anything but actual escrow accounts. They were simply