You did the right thing, insisted on keeping it within escrow and you may have avoided an issue. That vendor does however still have a (100) rating though and all the feedback is 5/5, hasn't been seen in 17 days so it is quite possible this vendor of 1 year isn't a scammer but has genuinely has run into some IRL difficulties that has impacted upon their vending. The term scammer gets thrown around a lot, sometimes it pays to dig a little deeper before making those types of accusations, I would say this could very well be one of those times as if anyone had been scammed it would have been picked up in the feedback scores by now.