Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:
https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed
A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times.
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