How to avoid escrow scams?

We know that escrow.com is not the safest option for the transaction of buying/selling a website. First of all, they don't actually handle the buying and selling of sites (though most people don't realise that). As they are just domain escrows it's dangerous to put a site transaction through them expecting that they'll cover the whole transaction. They don't. There are other caveats.

So some of us look elsewhere.

But there are a lot of escrow scams around. I've found a couple of good articles on the topic.

Bankrate.com offers 10 Tips For Spotting Escrow Scams and this one is about escrow scams within eBay. According to this MSNBC article, over 300 escrow scams are caught and shut down every year!

What tips do you have for avoiding escrow scams and/or what escrow do you use for domain transactions and what do you use for website transactions?