The housing crash of 2008, combined with the relative ease of buying property online, has ushered in a new era of real estate speculation. With millions of homeowners unable to pay their mortgages and taxes, abandoned properties are increasingly put up for auction in online tax sales, enabling out-of-state investors to snap up houses, sight unseen, in vacancy-plagued cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. The market is huge. Nationwide, according to the Center for Community Progress, more than 4.7 million properties currently stand empty—a number that surged by almost half between 2000 and 2010.

Despite earnest narratives about young homeowners working to rebuild American cities one DIY project at a time, many buyers in online tax sales are absentee real estate speculators buying in bulk. A Singapore businessman recently bought 414 properties during a single auction in Detroit; a Hong Kong billionaire named Jimmy Lai owns so many vacant houses in the city that they’re known as “Lai-sores.” At a Houston tax sale I attended in 2015, amid the crowd of mom-and-pop buyers—a young couple pushing a stroller, an old man in baggy camo shorts—veteran investors with briefcases full of cash stalked the bidding floor. “There’s a whole lot of money here,” said John Osenbaugh, a Houston real estate agent. “This guy who looks like a bum could be carrying several hundred thousand dollars.”

Part of the popularity of tax sales can be chalked up to unaccredited “schools”—like the erstwhile Trump University—which promise would-be investors they can get rich quick by buying up abandoned properties on the cheap in distressed cities. At the same time, the internet has made it possible to impulse-buy a house as easily as a flat-screen TV. Such schemes have inspired investors in England to purchase vacant properties in Cleveland over eBay, and a Colorado pawnbroker to close on homes in Buffalo via PayPal.

For investors, there are myriad ways to make money off a building you bought for less than the cost of a used car. You can rent it out and make back your investment within a year—as long as you don’t spend much, if anything, on repairs. You can sell to desperate homebuyers—offering them financing at exorbitant interest rates, or including contract provisions that allow you to seize the property after one or two missed payments. You can seek out blighted areas near hospitals or universities, betting that an expanding institution will eventually gobble up the neighborhood and pay you handsomely for your roofless, collapsing investment. Or you can sell to other speculators. “That’s the ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ variation of the real estate game,” says Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress. “You buy really cheap and then sell at a markup to other investors much less sophisticated than you are.”

In theory, tax sales are supposed to replenish city coffers and transfer vacant homes from delinquent owners to people who will actually improve the properties. But the mass purchasing of distressed homes by faraway investors is having the opposite effect. According to a case study of Cleveland by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, properties owned by out-of-state and high-volume investors are far more likely to remain empty, have delinquent tax bills, violate local building codes, and ultimately require demolition.

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