Net54baseball.com Forums - New Baseball Card Book Just Published

I recently read another book that any eBayer would find interesting even though it's not sports related but the same thing could and probably has happened with fake cards or bogus sports memorabilia. Here's a mini-capsule review:

The book Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay is a true story of a young attorney named Ken Walton, who meets up with a former army buddy from years past, Ken Fetterman, who introduces Walton to the new world of internet selling on eBay in the late 1990's. Fetterman's specialty was selling art paintings and appeared to develop a very lucrative business in the early days of this on-line flea market. Shortly after reuniting, Walton and Fetterman worked as a team in Sacramento, CA selling these paintings on eBay. Their business model was rather simple: go around to all the local antique stores and thrift shops and find all the quality works of paintings they could find and resell them on eBay. But it wasn't quite that simple - there was a twist to their business model. Their operation included several unscrupulous business practices that helped generate consistently profitable sales including shill bidding (artificially inflating the bidding by using numerous phony accounts) and forging high-demand artists signatures on art pieces made by good amateurs.

Their main ploy that kept them from being accused or indicted of fraud was using the "naive seller" routine, where in the auction description they would claim that they knew nothing about art but found this painting at a garage or estate sale and would make no assurances of the painting's authenticity, but they would show close-up scans of the artist's signature and by doing this would entice sophisticated art collectors to bid on their bogus paintings thinking that they were going to pull one over on this hapless seller. To show how greed blinded these predatory buyers, several painting sold for exorbitantly high prices and out of fear of being discovered at some point in time by art authenticators, Walton and Fetterman panicked and told the buyers that they were now concerned that the paintings were fakes and would advise them to cancel the sale. But to their amazement, the buyers would insist on completing the sale in spite of these dire warnings and insisted they would be willing to take all the risk, even if the paintings turned out to be fakes. Once trick they used to make a phony, high-priced sale seem credible was to use a bogus identity claiming to be an art expert and then e-mail the winning bidder shortly after he won the painting and congratulate him for getting such a great deal on a highly sought-after work of art and ask if he'd allow them to use that painting for a cover story for an art magazine.

This type of buying insanity finally came to a head in May 2000 when Walton listed a painting with a forged signature that made it appear to be signed by a popular artist Richard Diebenkorn. With Fetterman's help of shill bidding, this painting ended up selling for an astonishing $135,858 and was won by a Dutch millionaire. Some major media outlets picked on the sale including the New York Times and the local newspaper and started doing some inquiries about the auction. One thing that was discovered rather quickly by the press by contacting neighbors and friends was that the auction description contained some big whopping lies such as Walton being married with children. Once that was discovered it didn't take reporters too long to figure out the shill bidding scheme and then the authenticity of the painting itself became very doubtful as some local art dealers requested to see the painting before the auction closed but Walton found excuses to keep them away.

But in spite of all of this bad press, the Dutch millionaire still wanted the painting and when Walton suggested he not complete the sale for $135,858, the buyer threatened to sue him. Walton then suggested that he would like to have some art experts look at the painting first before finalizing the sale and the art collector agreed. To Walton's utter amazement, the signature passed the experts' black light test but there were other issues that put some doubt in the expert's minds yet some things seemed to give the painting some credibility in the experts' eyes as well.

With all of this bad media attention, it didn't take long for the FBI to get involved. Initially, it was just agents showing up at Walton's house or office leaving their business cards with neighbors and business associates requesting that Walton call them. That didn't seem very ominous, so Walton contacted them hoping to get just a warning or answer some routine questions. It didn't take long to realize that he was in serious trouble since they had a comprehensive pile of evidence regarding all of the shill bidding accounts. It went downhill from there and Walton had to retain a criminal attorney and finally cut a deal over a lengthy process: probation with full restitution. Perhaps the most devastating blow was that Walton had to resign from the bar as an attorney. Amazingly enough, when all of his eBay victims were contacted that they'd been defrauded, only a small portion responded to the restitution agreement.

Meanwhile, Ken Walton's partner in crime, Ken Fetterman, avoided arrest and was on the lamb for over a year until finally getting caught on a routine traffic stop for a cracked windshield in Kansas and ended being sentenced to over 4 years of imprisonment.

Although this book deals with art, I found it a very worthwhile read for someone with an interest in sports collectibles and uses eBay frequently since many lessons can be gleaned from this highly publicized true crime story.