Product Description

It was the golden age of eBay. Optimistic bidders went online to the world's largest flea market in droves, ready to spend cash on everything from garden gnomes to Mercedes convertibles. Among them were art collectors willing to spend big money on unseen paintings, hoping to buy valuable pieces of art at below-market prices. EBay also attracted the occasional con artist unable to resist the temptation of abusing a system that prided itself on being "based on trust." Kenneth Walton -- once a lawyer bound by the ethics of his profession to uphold the law -- was seduced by just such a con artist and, eventually, became one himself.

Ripped from the headlines of the New York Times, the first newspaper to break the story, Fake describes Walton's innocent beginnings as an online art-trading hobbyist and details the downward spiral of greed that ultimately led to his federal felony conviction. What started out as a satisfying exercise in reselling thrift store paintings for a profit in order to pay back student loans and mounting credit card debt soon became a fierce addiction to the subtle deception of luring unsuspecting bidders into overpaying for paintings of questionable origins.

In a landscape peopled with colorful eccentrics hoping to score museum-quality paintings at bargain prices, Walton entered into a partnership with Ken Fetterman, an unslick (yet somehow very effective) con man. Over the course of eighteen months they managed to take in hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling forged paintings and bidding on their own auctions to drive up the prices. When their deception was discovered and made international headlines, Walton found himself stalked by reporters and federal agents while Fetterman went on the lam, sparking a nationwide FBI manhunt. His elaborate game of cat and mouse lasted nearly three years, until the feds caught up with him after a routine traffic violation and brought him to justice.

In this sensational story of the seductive power of greed, Kenneth Walton breaks his silence for the first time and, in his own words, details the international scandal that forever changed the way eBay does business.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343215 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In November 1998, Walton was a bored, unproductive 31-year-old Sacramento attorney when a "boorish" army buddy, Ken Fetterman, showed him his eBay art auctions on the Internet, gave him a five-minute tutorial on "the world's largest flea market" and cut Walton in on an auction that doubled his $400 investment. Soon Walton was frequenting thrift stores, making shill bids to raise the price on his own and Fetterman's auctions and selling paintings with signatures he strongly suspected were doctored by Fetterman, even allowing one buyer to think he'd landed a Giacometti. When Walton forges Richard Diebenkorn's signature on a painting that auctions for $135,805 in May 2000, the result is front-page coverage in the New York Times and an FBI investigation. The amoral slacker loses friends, lovers and his law license. eBay bans him for life; he pleads guilty to a felony and gets probation. Walton is humbled but gains a conscience, a pure love of art and a passion for computer programming. This engrossing morality tale is also a primer on how to commit Internet fraud, an indictment of eBay and its lackadaisical attitudes about crime, as well as a sad commentary on society where art is a commodity to be bought sight unseen by the greedy and foolish. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Walton reveals the lunatic world of art speculation on eBay with a gripping tale of his own dizzying fall from grace. Insightful and darkly humorous, Fake is better than most thrillers, and more thrilling than any memoir I've read in years."

-- Dylan Schaffer, author of I Right the Wrongs

"Smooth, fast-paced tale of eBay chicanery. Highly recommended, read with confidence!!! (Probably wouldn't buy a painting from him, though.)"

-- Greg Beato

"Kenneth Walton's Fake really opens your eyes to the often unethical price-raising methods used by some sellers on eBay. Drop your mouse and read this book before you make one more bid!"

-- Doug Noble, Mountain Democrat

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter Six

THE SIXTH PART

Fetterman and I soon embarked on what turned out to be our final art-buying trip together, a frenzied journey that took us from Sacramento to Las Vegas and back in three and a half days. By the time we took this last trip, we had gotten it down to a science.

Fetterman paid an early-morning visit to the Sacramento International Airport to rent a minivan. He made sure the rental contract included unlimited mileage, a provision we intended to exploit without shame. To maximize cargo space, we usually removed the backseat of the van; this created enough room to store more than a hundred paintings, if they were stacked carefully. This time the backseat was connected to the van with a bicycle lock and could not be removed, which infuriated Fetterman.

"Relax," I told him, and folded the seat forward. We still had plenty of room. I shoved about twenty flattened boxes in the back to use as buffers between delicate paintings.

As usual, each of us left for the trip with a folded stack of hundred-dollar bills. I brought two thousand dollars. For on-the-road research, we brought a copy of Davenport's, Hughes's Artists in California, and two signature guides. Anything more only got in the way.

I was the navigator. Before the trip I spent hours poring through Internet Yellow Pages to find each antique and thrift store in our path. I used mapping software to plot a route through all the stores in each town and kept everything organized in a binder.

Fetterman appreciated this efficiency, because he was obsessed with making good time. His jerky, kinetic gestures became more pronounced on these trips and his gait quickened to an awkward race-walking pace. After buying paintings at a store, he would tuck them under his arms and fly out the door so quickly a bystander might have thought he had stolen them. If we entered a large antique shop together, he would go in one direction and I would head in the other, so we could search the place as quickly as possible. If we found two adjacent shops, he popped into one while I checked the other.

Within a few hours of our departure, my optimistic mood was turning sour. Fetterman usually felt the need to take charge when we were on the road, and this morning he went so far as to question my ability to shop for art. "You didn't find anything?" he said with slack-jawed incredulity when I left a store I had searched by myself without buying anything.

"There's nothing in there," I said.

He rushed into the store to make sure. He came out empty-handed too, but I knew if he had found something he'd have badgered me about it for the next hundred miles. Fetterman's impatience demanded we eat only at restaurants with drive-through lanes. If he found something on sale, such as a burger for ninety-nine cents, he would buy several and save them for later, so we wouldn't have to stop again for a while.

More disturbing than his impatience was his inane chatter. His three favorite topics while on the road were eBay, the time we'd spent in the army, and large-breasted women. His sense of humor was always juvenile, and sometimes it bordered on slapstick. One gag he enjoyed was pointing his finger at my chest, as if indicating a stain on my shirt, then smacking my chin with the back of his hand when I looked down. He would giggle wildly if I ever fell for that one. Another of his favorite tricks was burping into his hand and quickly holding it up in front of my nose, expecting me to tell him the contents of his last meal. "Knock it off!" I would say, clenching my teeth as I shoved his burp-filled hand out of my face.

But here's the thing: I put up with it. No one was forcing me to be in the car with him. I didn't have to endure his childish jokes and condescending insults. I did it for one simple reason: the money I was making on eBay. I tolerated him with embarrassing passivity. There seemed to be no end to what I would endure, and do, in order to keep art and money passing through my hands.

One thing Fetterman and I did agree on was our obsession with eBay, and one of the most unpleasant things about being on the road was being separated from our favorite website. Public Internet access was not easy to find in early 2000, especially in rural areas. We might stop at a library or a Kinko's, but it was easier to call a friend or relative. "Hi, Mom? Could you check my auctions again?" I loathed making these annoying requests, and felt like a drug addict who was continually asking to borrow money from relatives to support his habit.

We made it all the way down the Central Valley in the early morning hours and visited shops in the desert cities of Lancaster and Palmdale before lunch. Just after noon, we stopped at a place called The Orbit, a grimy antique store in Pearblossom, an unfortunate cluster of buildings nestled along a barren stretch of two-lane Highway 138, outside of Palmdale. The shop was a vast depository of grotesque furniture, carpet remnants, obsolete home electronics, coffee mugs with clever sayings, and tangles of forgotten and mostly undesirable objects. A narrow path snaked through this collection of rubble. While perusing this mess I noticed a large orange and green abstract painting perched crookedly atop a stack of milk jugs behind a bicycle frame. It reminded me of something, but I wasn't sure what. I climbed over a Naugahyde sofa and a stack of board games to get to it. The canvas was covered in a viscous layer of grime that spread to my hands and shirt. The price? Eight dollars, after some haggling with the elderly proprietor. We left Pearblossom and headed up Interstate 15 toward Nevada, stopping in Victorville and Barstow and several other small towns before night fell.

On the final stretch of highway before we reached Nevada, as the sun dipped below the horizon and left behind the brilliant, sad colors unique to the desert, Fetterman leaned out the window and snapped photos with his new digital camera. Before long the sky was black. About fifty miles from Las Vegas, in the middle of an uninhabited desert, traffic on the interstate slowed to a surreal standstill. For nearly thirty minutes we sat trapped on an unlit four-lane highway along with hundreds of other people, forming a chain of cars that stretched as far as the eye could see. Then traffic started creeping again, just as inexplicably as it had stopped, and we were soon cruising at freeway speed. There was no accident being cleared, no roadwork. Just a traffic jam in the desert. Obstacles sometimes appear where they're least expected.

As we pulled into Vegas, Fetterman spoke for the first time in nearly an hour.

"You still seeing that same chick?"

"Katherine? No, I broke up with her last week." I ended things because I had been unable to resolve my ambivalence about our relationship, the way I admired Katherine's strength of character even as I was bothered by her domesticity and all the "settling down" it carried with it. Settling down meant accepting myself for who I was, a frightening endeavor I wasn't ready to undertake despite the things I loved about Katherine. But I wasn't going to explain all of this to Fetterman. This wasn't the sort of thing we talked about.

"Too bad. She was hot, man. Maybe we can pick up some women tonight in Vegas. I hear this place is crawling with them."

In Las Vegas, Fetterman and I stayed at the Venetian, a thirty-six-story casino hotel that tried, without success, to look like the city of Venice. The next morning we set out to look for art. Most people come to Vegas hoping to win money in the casinos, but Fetterman and I found our jackpot at the city's antique stores. The place was a trove of reasonably priced art that was ideal for resale on eBay.

The abundance of art in Las Vegas was a surprise. For one thing, Vegas has relatively few antique stores for a city of its size. This is understandable, as the city had been nothing more than a fork in the road until 1941, when the first big casino was built. Anything antique in Las Vegas was brought in from somewhere else. Secondly, Las Vegas has never had a thriving local arts scene. Instead of galleries displaying quality original work by local artists, Las Vegas has high-priced art shops in the casinos that sell gaudy reproductions of famous paintings. Finally, to the extent that there is money among the local residents, it's new money, more likely to be spent on flashy cars and stucco mansions than tasteful art collections. Vegas just isn't the type of city where I expected to find much art. It was Fetterman's idea to go there.

But I was wrong. The antique stores in Vegas were packed with good paintings. We unearthed handsome nineteenth-century landscapes and fascinating abstract paintings from the 1950s. We came across decent paintings in all styles from all over the United States, Europe, and Latin America. We found something to buy in nearly every shop we visited, and in a single day we purchased sixty pieces.

Why so much good art? I could only guess. For one thing, Las Vegas is not just a place to gamble, it is a retirement town. The weather is warm and dry and the real estate's cheap, so it attracts people from around the country to many new developments targeted at retirees. When people retire they get rid of things, including furniture and art.

Las Vegas is also a frontier town where people come from other places to seek fortunes or make new starts. Not all of them make it. Some go bankrupt, some start drinking again, some grow weary of the heat, and some reconcile with spouses left behind. For whatever reason, a lot of people leave Las Vegas not long after moving there. There's a lot of coming and going, and where there is coming and going, things fall through the cracks. People have to sell stuff quickly. Some forget to pay the rent on storage units. Good paintings trickle into the local market. One of the more memorable finds of that day was a beautiful landscape by the Florida artist Harold Newton, whose work was becoming very popular in, but rarely found outside of, his native state.

The seeming abundance of art may also have been due to th...

Customer Reviews

Fake - Forgery, Lies, & eBAY
This great analysis of the internet market over eBAY has been passed through the art lovers in our family. Their response has been very interesting, indeed !

book far more intresting than title
Someone had recommended this book to me as a "good read". really didn't even know why I bought the book as I thought reading about ebay would be totally boring. Well I was wrong. The book sat on a shelf at my home for 3 months before I even opened the cover. Couldn't sleep one night and picked the book and started to read. I honestly couldn't put it down until I had finished from cover to cover. It is a great story and well written by the author. Whether you don't care about art or even Ebay this is an interesting story written in such a way that you find yourself totally emersed in the deceptions of an art forger who gets caught and the story line of getting caught and punished in a court of law. This is a good read.

a lawyer and a snitch...
This "author" is a liar, a lawyer, and a snitch. If you think it couldn't get any worse it does: he thinks his writing is clever. Wait for his victim (Fetterman)'s book.