Latest / VREF | The Truth About the Aviation Market / The $500 Million Escrow Betrayal | EP 57

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The $500 Million Escrow Betrayal | EP 57 · VREF | The Truth About the Aviation Market

• Addison: Somewhere today, possibly while you're listening to this, somebody wired $40 million to a company in Oklahoma City they never visited, run by people they have never met, and it's in an industry with no federal license, no dedicated regulator, and no government guarantee behind the account, and they did it without losing a minute of sleep. That same person, that same evening, spent twenty minutes on hold fighting a ninety dollar charge on their credit card. Forty million wired to strangers, no questions asked, ninety dollars, twenty minutes of questions. That gap between what we check and what we simply trust is what this episode is about. Because the strangers in Oklahoma City are an aircraft escrow agent. The entire used aircraft market, tens of billions a year, clears through a handful of these firms. Most within a few miles of one airport, and almost nobody who depends on them can tell you how they work or what actually protects the money. And here's why this episode exists. In 2020, one of those trusted Oklahoma City names, a firm that had been closing deals for decades, turned out to be running one of the largest frauds in aviation history through the very escrow accounts its clients trusted, half a billion dollars, and a sixteen year federal sentence. So today we're going to talk about what escrow is. We're going to talk about who the players are, how a closing works, who won't touch a back-to-back, what it costs on a Gulf Stream and on a Skyhawk, and what the Wright Brothers case teaches us about the difference between trusting a name and verifying a structure. Welcome back to the Truth About the Market. I'm Jason Zilberbrand. I am president of VREF, the valuation firm that the banks, insurance companies, courts, and appraisal professions. have relied on for decades. I'm an accredited senior appraiser. I've been the expert witness when eight-figure deals went to litigation, and I've watched more closings than I can count. The smooth ones, the ugly ones, and the ones that died with the money in flight. Today's episode is about the least glamorous but most important seat at every closing table. Deals aren't done when the handshake happens. They are done when escrow says they're done. It's also about what happens when that trust breaks, because it did and recently and in public. And the industry has mostly chosen not to talk about it. But we will. Everything I say about the case comes from the Department of Justice, the court record, and published reporting. So bring a pencil. The last segment is a checklist that might save you a deposit. So let's talk about what an aircraft sale is, because it's a standoff by design. The buyer won't release millions or hundreds of thousands until he owns the airplane. The seller, well, he's not releasing the airplane until he has the money. And neither can move first. Both are usually strangers, and the asset, unlike a house, can start its engines and be in another country by dinner time. Somebody neutral has to hold everything, the money, the bill of sale, the lien releases, the registration paperwork. And release it all in one choreographed instant. So neither side ever holds both the plane and the money. And that's the what. But in aviation, the escrow agent does a second job. That's arguably bigger. Aircraft title in the United States runs on a race notice system. The first properly executed document filed with the FAA registry wins, not the first deal signed, the first document filed. And there is one registry in one building. And it's in Oklahoma City. If a lien release or a bill of sale gets filed in the wrong order, or an old lien from 1987 was never released, you can wire every dollar correctly and still not own your airplane cleanly. On a 60-year-old aircraft with a dozen owners across three countries, title work is archaeology. The escrow agent runs the dig. The money is the visible half of the job. The paper is the half that earns the fee. And the why is now obvious. The alternative is trusting the other side of the deal. The used aircraft market exists at its scale because escrow removed the need for two strangers to trust each other. The only half to trust the middleman. Hold that sentence. It's gonna hurt later. So let's talk about the players a little bit. And let's talk about why they're all in Oklahoma City. So this is what happened. In 1958, the Federal Aviation Act created the FAA. And the civil aircraft registry landed at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City. Every registration, every bill of sale, and lien for every N numbered aircraft on Earth gets recorded in one building. For most of sixty years, filing men physically walking documents to the public documents room, dates stamped in sequence, first in wins, run, race, notice priority through one physical window, and you get an industry that crystallized around One federal building the way it reforms around a wreck. The FAA's own list of title companies and law firms runs to 32 names. About 25 have Oklahoma City addresses. Combined, they employ fewer people than a mid-sized car dealership. Combined, they clear tens of billions of dollars a year. From the outside, they look interchangeable, but they aren't. So let's start at the top because there is a top. If you ask me who the gold standard is, the answer is Insured Aircraft Title Service. IETS has been in business since 1963. Matthew Kelly bought it in 1968 and did something nobody else in town thought to do. He built an insurance company around it. IETS doesn't just search a title, it can insure it, which means it's the one shop in town that has to live with its own mistakes financially. And that changes how carefully the work gets done. Kirk Wolford has been president since 1987. Joan Roberts, she has run escrow there since 1997. Same people, same deaths, three decades. That continuity is the product, and it's why IETS is on every lender's approved escrow list. When a Senate subcommittee needed someone to explain in 2010 how a dictator's son bought a Gulf Stream through Oklahoma City, well, it was IATS that sent the witness. Now, I have no relationship with IETS. None at all. They have never paid me a dime. I'm just telling you who I would use to wire money to. Then there's AIC Title Service. It was founded in 1989. And then Clay and Holly Healy, they bought it in 2003. And then they bought Aero Records and Title in 2010. And at that moment, they claimed that roughly half the market used them. Since then, the marketing has been the loudest in town: a blockchain closing room, a tornado-proof vault. A state and ambition to house records for every aircraft in the world. I'll be careful because I'm saying it on the record. Volume and marketing tell you nothing about what happens to your file or your deposit when something goes sideways. My experience, and I've sat at a lot of closing tables, is that this is precisely the firm the five questions in the last segment were written for. Ask them. All five. In writing, and pay attention not to the answers, but how the questions are received. That's my opinion. And it's only based on what I've seen. Tellingly, when AIC bought Aero Records, some of Aero Records people didn't go along for the ride. They walked down the street and they opened Business Aircraft Title International. And that's how this reef grows. It's not by new arrivals, it's by fission. And you can learn a lot about a firm from who leaves it. Okay, next up. Aerospace Reports. It's a family firm. It was founded in 69. Its third generation is running it now. They own the piston and like turbo prop channel. 3,500 escros a year is what they claim. Most of them are bonanzas and probably cirruses. Volume, not size. You'll see them wearing an AOPA strategic partner badge, and we're gonna hold that for the piston segment. Then a newer generation, mostly trained at the older houses. You have Aero Title, Elite Aircraft title, international aircraft title, and escrow. Aviator's title, Dixie Air, and Hunt and Company, which is a boutique that sells exactly one thing, one named officer on every file, and two signatures on every wire, which, as we'll see, is not a small thing to sell. And then there's the lawyers. And here's something almost nobody outside the business knows. When a brand new Gulf Stream or a brand new citation or global or whatever rolls off the line to its first owner, that closing generally doesn't go through a title company. It goes through a law firm. And for most of the manufacturers, they use one of the two, McAfee and Taft or Crow and Dunleavy. The OEMs, with more lawyers, more leverage, and more at stake per delivery than any buyer ever will, looked at the entire reef and kept coming back to the same two doors. McAfee and Taft is the marquee name. They have nine attorneys, 17 paralegals, and they drafted the aircraft title insurance policy that everyone uses. Their practice leader sits on the NAFA board and the advisory board of the International Registry in Dublin. Crow and Dunleevy is Oklahoma's oldest law firm, with with an aviation group that sat on the factory side of delivery closings for as long as anyone can remember. And then there's Gilchrist Aviation Law, Dottry Fowler, Feller Snyder, every one of them within a few miles of the registry. Notice who they belong to. There is no aircraft title association. These firms are organized through NBAA, the dealers' associations, and NAFA, which is the National Aircraft Finance Association. And then you have the lenders, and that's the tell. The escrow industry's real customer isn't you, it's the bank who has to wire to clear against a clean title. The market is small enough that they all referee each other. Part of the system's quiet strength, and part of why one bad actor was so hard for anyone to imagine. Because until a few years ago, that list had one more name on it. Wright Brothers, Aircraft Title, founded in 2001. It was run by a woman named Deborah Mercer Irwin, Debbie to an industry that had known her since 1989. She sat on the board at NAFA, let that sink in. And Debbie ran a second company, and hold that because segment four is hers. Which brings us to the owner trustee shops. U.S. registration requires citizenship. The legal workaround is non-citizen trusts. A U.S. trustee holds title for a foreign beneficial owner, and the airplane rides on the N number. More than 10,000 aircraft sit in these trusts, and the inspector general found 54% of them with incomplete ownership records. The trustee shops, they're not in Oklahoma City. It's TVPX, it's Bank of Utah, and it's Wells Fargo Trust in Salt Lake City because of Utah Trust Law. And one trustee was in Onalaska, Texas, a town of 3,000 with no airport, and for a stretch of years, more registered aircraft in San Diego, and that was Aircraft Guarantee Corporation. Its owner was Deborah Mercer Irwin, one of the escrow houses and one of the trustee shops, both sides of the curtain. The structure puts the trustee's name on the public record and the real owner behind it. Its integrity depends entirely on the trustee knowing. and caring who's back there. Segment four is about what happens when the trustee is the curtain. One more layer. Since 2006, larger aircraft also live on the International Registry, which is in Dublin, under the Cape Town Convention. A modern jet closing is a two-registry race, Oklahoma City and Dublin, which is why your closing happens at 7 a.m. Central, that's Dublin's afternoon. Alright, let's take a quick pause. And you know what's coming. I'm gonna ask you to please follow the show and like this episode and subscribe and leave us a rating. This show runs on full market debt and zero sponsorship from anyone it covers. So we don't get money from these escrow firms. We don't get money from title companies, no law firm paid for this episode, zero sponsorship, which is the only reason the fourth segment can exist, which you'll hear in a little bit. The algorithm is my only marketing department. And as I've told you before. You guys, you are the algorithm. So I just ask you for 10 seconds, give me a thumbs up, and I'm gonna thank you now. All right, let's talk about the process. And let's talk about how a closing actually works. It starts weeks out. Purchase agreements get signed. A buyer deposits wires to escrow, not to the seller ever. The deposit sits in the agent's account while the buyer runs his pre-buy. And at some defined moment the deposit goes hard, which means it's non refundable except for very specific failures. The most common deal fight I see, it isn't about price. It's whether the deposit went hard before or after the buyer decided to walk away. Escrow holds the money while the lawyers fight. That's the point. While the inspection runs, the title work runs. This, not the wire, is where closings die quietly. A lien nobody can release is a Deal nobody can close, guys. Then closing day comes. Everyone confirms in writing. Funds are in escrow, in full. Lender payoffs confirm to the day. Bill of sale, registration application, lien releases are signed and in escrow. The airplane is positioned where the tax planning says it should sit. Then one conference call and the agent executes. Funds are released in the same breath the documents go to filing. FAA sequence protected. Dublin consents in their window, the irreversible pivot of a $30 million deal, it takes about 90 seconds. Now, let's talk about the back-to-backs. A back-to-back is two closings stacked on the same airplane on the same day. The seller sells to an intermediary. A dealer taking a position is a really good example. And the intermediary or the dealer sells it then to the end buyer, which is minutes apart. Often through the same escrow agent. Done properly, it's legitimate. The dealer takes real title, real risk, a real margin, but understand what it means at the other end. Your wire is frequently what funds the intermediary's purchase, right? It's the buyer's money. It's your money allowing the dealer to do the back-to-back. The two contracts are confidential from each other. So neither end knows the middleman's margin. And if The second leg collapses after leg one funds, the intermediary owns a plane he never meant to own, and everyone's instructions get tested. If a dealer is in your deal, you're probably in a back-to-back, and your escrow instructions need to say explicitly what happens if the other leg fails. Who's for them, and who won't touch them. Because here's the industry quietly disagrees with itself. The escrow shops They will run these back-to-backs. It's two closings. They get pad paid twice. Aerospace reports lists back to backs right on its services page. The dealer trade groups are built on them. And they'll tell you correctly that a dealer standing in the middle with real capital at risk is what makes a lot of these deals close. So who won't? Who won't do back-to-backs? The lenders. If an end buyer is financing, the bank is lending against a bill of sale from the registered owner and to its borrower. It will not wire into a deal where the party selling to its borrower doesn't hold title yet. Most lenders flat out refuse outright or require an intermediary to actually take title, which is a recorded bill of sale, in a second one out, which puts the dealer in the chain of title where the dealer doesn't want to be. Right? Know your customer rules. KYC, you hear it all the time. It cuts the same way. A pass-through bill of sale that skips the middle and is exactly what anti-montery laundering compliance exists to catch. The OEMs on a new aircraft forget it. Every manufacturer's purchase agreement prohibits assignment. The delivery closes from the factory to the buyer of record, period. End of discussion. And the careful title people, the better shops, will run a back-to-back, but they'll insist on the version where the intermediary is actually in the chain, rather than the version where the original owner signs a bill of sale with the buyer's name left blank. And the dealer fills it in. The second version is very common, and it's the one where the middleman can be in your deal without appearing on a single piece of paper. If your agent shrugs at that, you've learned something about your escrow agent. So let's talk about the red flags because they're simple. The seller on your contract isn't the FAA registered owner. That's a flag. The bill of sale in escrow isn't signed by the party you're contracted with. That is a big red flag. Nobody can tell you whether your deposit became somebody else's deposit. Think about that. And any one of those. And you're in a back to back, whether anybody told you you were or not. It might be perfectly legitimate. It should never be a surprise. It should be fully transparent. One more mechanic deposit with escrow. And deposit release to seller at signing. Both appear in real purchase agreements, separated by the entire subject of this episode. Read the wire instructions against the contract every single time. And the fees? This should shock you in the other direction. Escrow on a jet runs a flat fee in the low to mid thousands, not a percentage. Thousands. Flat. To stand behind a wire the size of a lottery jackpot. In real estate, a closing this size would cost points, not basis points. That mispricing explains the market. Flat fees against unlimited feeling liability only work at volume. Volume only comes with trust, and trust compounds over decades, which is why there are five real firms doing this, not fifty. Now to the people who heard 40 million in the cold open and reached for the skip button. Stay. Let me tell you, this is the segment for the $110,000 $182, and it matters more to you than the Jet segment did to the Jet guys. First, where do you go? And I'm gonna be blunt about the route. Go to Aerospace Reports directly. Don't go through AOPA. Aerospace Reports is a 56-year-old family firm that does more piston escrow's than anybody else, and they're really just fine at it. What I want you to understand is the badge. AOPA calls them a strategic partner, markets a member discount on their title package and escrow fees, and gets paid for that placement. That's what a strategic partner is. AOPA doesn't disclose what it collects. and you won't find the arrangement explained on the page that sends you there. Now think about what we've spent three segments establishing. The entire value of an escrow agent is that it has exactly one interest. The instructions. A membership organization taking a cut off the top of your escrow while calling the vendor preferred is a financial interest sitting in one place in the transaction where financial interest is supposed to be forbidden. Think about how unethical this is. In any other profession, we'd call that Undisclosed referral fee. Here, it's hidden as a membership benefit. I'll have to say a lot more about ALPA later this fall, but for today, I just want you to call the escrow company yourself. The numbers are small and that's the point. A title search at Aerospace Reports is $85. The full package with records and accident history is $190. Escrow on a piston single runs $600-700, customarily split. Between the buyer and the seller. And if you're financing, the lender's closing costs on a 182 run another five to eight hundred bucks. The entire apparatus of a clean closing clock costs less than one hour of an aviation attorney. And here's what nobody says out loud: your title risk is higher than the Gulfstream buyer's. His airplane is eight years old with two corporate owners. Yours is a 1976 airframe with 11 previous owners. Two of who died, one of whom financed it through a savings and loan that stopped existing in 1991. And you know what they did? Or didn't do? They never released the lien, orphan liens, missing bills of sale in the chain, a registration that lapsed between the FA's seven year renewal came due while the airplane sat in probate court. That's the piston market, guys. That's archaeology at $85. So, specifically, one, the deposits. Typically five to ten thousand dollars. It goes to escrow, not to the seller, ever, under any conditions, under a purchase agreement that says when it goes hard. The number of piston deals that close with a cashier's check handed across the hood of a truck at the FBO is staggering. And everyone is a title search nobody ran. Guys, stop doing it. Use use escrow. I'm begging you. Stop making these purchases blindly. You're buying liens. It's causing a lot of issues. Two, the search goes back to first registration. And you read the chain. Every bill of sale in the sequence, every lien in its release. If a release is missing, the agent chases it down. If the bank is gone, they know which successor bank ate it. It's important, guys. Three, the paperwork. An eighty fifty dash two. It's a bill of sale signed by the registered owner. The exact name on the FAA record. Not the widow, not the son. Not the LLC that's almost the same name. Your 8050-1 registration application. Lien releases in hand before closing. 4. Sales and use tax. Where the airplane sits when the bill of sale is signed is where it's taxable. A flyaway or casual sale exemption can be the difference between zero tax and 7%. And if you close in the wrong county on the wrong Tuesday and you've handed the state more than that escrow cost you, And it's 10 times over. All right. Five. Back to backs. They happen at your end of the market too, guys. The guy selling you the bonanza off of Barnstormer's ad may not own it yet. Pull the FAA registry yourself. It's free. It takes literally 90 seconds. And it's going to save you a whole bunch of time and hassle before you ever send anybody a dollar. And if you're financing, the bank will often run the closing through its own arrangement. And that's fine. The bank protecting its lien protects your title. The cash buyer is the one with nobody in the middle. $600 fixes that, guys. Okay. Everything here comes from the Department of Justice. This is it. This is what you guys have been waiting to hear. The federal court record in the Eastern District of Texas and published reporting principally by WFAA in Dallas. And If you're just tuning in or you don't know what I'm talking about, I am talking about the Wright Brothers case. Debbie Mercer Irwin. She owned two companies. One was Wright Brothers Aircraft Title in Oklahoma City, which is an escrow agent, which was one of the names on the short list. And then the other company was Aircraft Guarantee Corporation in Texas, which held title and trust for foreign owners. So their aircraft could ride on the U.S. registry. Two businesses, built entirely on trust, and the one person owned both. The trust side broke first. When WFAA asked a simple question, why does a town of 3,000 people in Texas have more registered aircraft than most states? The answer was aircraft guarantee. Hundreds of planes held for foreign owners the public record couldn't see. According to the indictment and the jury's verdict, Some of those aircraft ended up flying for transnational drug traffickers, U.S. registered, wearing the credibility of the N number, able to fly anywhere in the United States. And when they flew internationally, because they had an N-numbered aircraft, they were less likely to get ramp-checked. The jury convicted her on cocaine conspiracy. And not because she flew drugs, but because the structure she ran enabled the people who did fly the drugs. The escrow side is the part every listener needs to understand, because it attacked the exact mechanism we've spent three segments praising. According to the indictment and trial testimony, investors, many brought in by this Florida dealer named Federico Machato through his company South Aviation, were told their money was a refundable deposit at an aircraft transaction which had been safely parked in escrow at Wright Brothers. See, when you use the word escrow, it's a magic word. Except there was often no airplane, the aircraft didn't exist, or it wasn't for sale. And a forensic accountant testified the same 22 aircraft were sold in 47 transactions between 2015 and 2020. The deposits didn't sit, they flowed to repay earlier investors, which was a Ponzi-style scam, and roughly $75 million to entities Machado controlled. And Debbie's take, nearly $5 million in escrow fees. Plus interest skimmed off the account. Well, the investor losses between 350 and $560 million. Read that back slowly. $560 million. And I believe her restitution, as of a few months ago, was just under $200 million. So let's read that back slowly. The escrow account, the thing that exists, so nobody has to trust anybody, was the instrument of the fraud. The victims did what the industry told them. They wired to escrow at a decades-hold Oklahoma city firm, all the things I've told you to do, with a name the whole industry recognized. On May 3rd, 2023, a federal jury convicted Debbie on money laundering and wire fraud conspiracy and the drug conspiracy counts. And on November 20th, 2024, she was sentenced to 16 years and she was forfeiting $50 million. And then Machado fought extrad extradition from Argentina, and he fought it for more than four years, long enough to become a political scandal down there. I mean, it was craziness. And you can go Google it and you can go look at all the videos that are on YouTube. And that happened until federal agents flew him back to Texas last November. And it's kind of amazing. Not one industry media company has reported on this. Not one. And this past May he pleaded guilty to money laundering and fraud. Again, no reporting. The government dropped the drug counts. Again, no reporting. He awaited sentencing. He faced up to 20 years. Wright Brothers is gone from the shortlist. And here are the two lessons because the wrong one is easy to take. The wrong lesson is escrow can be trusted. Notice what that scheme was not. It was not buyers closing funds stolen out of live transactions. It was an investment fraud wearing escrow clothes. Victims putting money into an escrow account as an investment on Promise of returns from flipping aircraft. Precisely because the word escrow made it feel safe. Actual closings kept working through the whole period. What would have caught it? An escrow account pays nothing. So anyone promised yield from one was being promised somebody else's principal by definition. The same 22 airframes selling 47 times in five years is a pattern any transaction database would have flagged, ours included. Had anybody looked at the serial numbers instead of statements? Statements from the agent instead of the bank? One person controlling an escrow business and a trustee business with no regulator and no audits? None of it required subpoena power. It required the questions nobody asks the name they've known for twenty years, which is why I'm asking you to ask the questions. The right lesson. The word escrow is not the protection. The structure is, guys. An escrow account is exactly as safe as the segregation of its funds, the instructions that govern it, the insurance behind it, and the character of whoever controls it. Everything the victims relied on was reputation. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred reputation is real. Wright Brothers Escrow is the hundredth time, and it's why the last segment exists. So we gotta talk about how escrow protects the transfer. It makes sure you get the clean title at an agreed price. It is completely silent on whether the price was right. And as Machado scheme proved, a fraudulent deal can flow through an escrow account with real paperwork. Independent verification is the theme of this episode. And see, a VREF online membership is how you verify the number with current values and historical trends. And we give you operating costs and fleet data on virtually every aircraft that flies, and it's the same platform your bank is using. So when the money is real, get an accredited appraisal from someone whose number survives courtrooms. And I want you to VREF it. I want you to go to VREF.com because trust is not a substitute. All right, I'm going to talk about alternatives now and how to protect yourself because there are alternatives to Oklahoma City. And the question really is, should you use one of them? Aviation Council is escrow. That's one of them, right? Law firms hold closings through attorney trust accounts. Which sit under bar regulation, which has way more oversight than the unregulated escrow model. And your escrow holder is also your lawyer. You lose the assembly line fluency of a shop that closes a dozen deals a day, and you pay lawyer fees, which is substantially higher. Then you've got the bank corporate trust departments. If you didn't know that exists, it's maximum regulatory oversight, real balance sheets, and typically less aviation fluency. And they have no instinct for the FA filing race. Banks will hold the money beautifully, but they do not chase those liens from 1987. If your deal has a border in it, ask how many deregistration closings the a the agent ran last year and to where. They all say international, but shouldn't you really find out who did what and if the number they tell you and really means it? And the FAA's e filing expansion is slowly eroding the geography that built Oklahoma City. It was a moat. It was never the street address. It's the expertise and the trust. My honest take, for most transactions, the answer isn't an alternative to a specialist. It's the specialist being verified. The fix is asking the questions that distinguish structure from reputation. And there's five of them. So here they are. One is my money in a segregated account, separate from the firm's operating funds, and every other client's closing. And will you confirm the account in the bank in writing? Segregation and writing is what makes parked mean parked. Two, what insurance stands behind you? Do you have ENO or errors and emissions insurance for mistakes and a fidelity bond for dishonesty? And what are the limits? And can you compare them to your wire amount? Three, how do you verify wire instructions? And what will you never do? Business email compromises the most common actual threatened closings today. Guys, I get two dozen emails a day from escrow companies, and none of them are real. A serious firm verifies by callback to a known number and never ever changes instructions on closing day without voice confirmation in both directions. And the 60 seconds that it cost you, well, that's the highest value minute in the transaction, if you ask me. Four. Who performs my title search? And how far back are you going? To first registration on anything older than the 80s? Ask what happens when they find an orphan lean, because it's when, not if. Five, what are your instructions if the deal dies? And in a back-to-back, what happens to my leg if the other one fails? The worst place to negotiate deposit return language is after the deal is dead. And by the way, here's a bonus question. Well, it's not really a question, but Did you know that you can literally write in your agreements with the dealer and escrow that no back-to-backs will take place? So if you're worried about it and you think the deal might be corrupt, well, you can certainly avoid it by just stating that you're not going to allow it. Now, every one of those has a boring answer at a good firm. And boring is the product. I tell people all the time, pick the boring product, it works, it's been around forever. You're paying a few thousand dollars for the most valuable thing in finance. A counterparty with no imagination and no upside in your deal. This is not the time to get fancy. Try something new, something that you never heard of, or one of those crazy firms that's like based in Russia and pretending to be in the UAE and claiming they can close all these deals with full transparency. Guys, don't do it. Move everything to the United States. Do it like everybody else. So the aircraft escrow system. Is one of the quiet marvels in this industry. It really is. If you think about it, it's a 60-year-old private architecture of trust that moves tens of billions of dollars a year on flat fees and a reputation. And kind of crazy, but it almost never fails. When people ask me what's right about aviation's institutions, escrow is usually one of my first answers. And one of its own burned half a billion dollars of trust to the ground using the very word as the bait. So both things are true. The lesson isn't that the system is rotten. It's that trust concentrated in a single people's hands that aren't regulated and aren't verified. Well, they'll eventually meet the wrong hands, and every protection the system offers was available to those victims if the structure had been checked instead of the name. So verify the structure. Ask the five questions I laid out. Wire, like it's the most dangerous minute of the deal because it is. The good firms will answer before you finish asking. It's the ones who bristle at the questions who just answered them for you. So that is the show today. It's the reef around the registry, the 90 second pivot, who won't touch a back-to-back, the $85 title search that protects your Cessna 182, your $1500 million betrayal. And The five questions that make sure it's never you. So do me a favor. Follow the show, like, subscribe, leave me a review. Send this to somebody with a deposit in escrow right now or thinking about placing a deposit in escrow and do it before their closing day. And to the escrow officers of Oklahoma City listening with steam coming out of your ears, the seats open. Come tell the war stories. I'll buy you a cup of coffee. My seat's open. I'm Jason Zilberbrand. This has been the truth about the aviation market. The market doesn't care what you wired, it only cares what got filed. Until then, we'll see you next week. Fly safe and stay smart.