In every deal, there’s a lot of trust involved leading up to closing that neither side is full of shit. Post-close, though, there is just no world in which a scam like this is not going to be (eventually) found out, and obviously there are legal remedies for that.

I feel like this is, roughly speaking, the system working as intended: Minimal friction to avoid slowing down the 99.9% of deals that don’t involve fraud, and reasonable deterrence for the remaining 0.1%. I’m sure there are lots of ways to prevent deals like this from closing in the first place, but I doubt most are worth the cost.