Yet if someone sells a car they are still paying for, the new owner gets it seized back, don't they? How very odd.
My exact thought, too. It's tough for the unsuspecting buyer (assuming they aren't in on it), but surely it's very basic law (and common sense) that you cannot become the owner of something by buying it from somebody who doesn't own it or have any right to sell it to you.
We're currently involved in a house sale and the conveyancing 'journey' is long and drawn out - as I expected - for precisely the reason that lots of checks have to be made to ensure that everybody involved is above board and legally allowed to buy/sell the property.
There are various stages that are so involved that the legitimate person can easily get paranoid and hope that they don't somehow mistakenly 'fail' the checks - like on gameshows, where you can tell that the contestant is 100% certain of quite an obvious answer, but is nevertheless still crossing their fingers and biting their lip.
There was a very good Mitchell & Webb sketch relating to this principle, where a man's bank was trying to tell him that he'd lost his money because he was a victim of 'identity theft'. He countered that his identity hadn't been stolen, because, erm, he still had it. He tenaciously managed to get the bank to admit that they had given away their money to somebody, who had apparently defrauded them by citing this man's name; but that, as he hadn't had any involvement in it, his own money was, of course, still safely in their care, as it had been all along.
Definitely something fishy about paying half the market value of the house, unless it was a crumbling ruin.