> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?

As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example).

There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where fraudulent documentation and virtually non-existent title checks allow this kind of fraud to persist.

[*] yes - virtually, not completely. It can happen, but the laws are set up such that the land owner will retain their land, the title fraud victim will be made whole financially by a title insurance company. What this means in practice is that title insurance companies make sure every transaction is legitimate and people don’t have to worry about it.

So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it.

Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.

Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0].

Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon.

[0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...