Kenneth Walton, who pled guilty to fraud in the infamous Diebenkorn art fraud case involving forged art and shill bidding on eBay, will be recounting his exploits in a tell-all tale called, "Fake: Forgery, Lies, And Ebay - How one man's con game created an international scandal and triggered a nationwide FBI manhunt."
Walton got an agent and signed the book deal after eBay forced him to sell his company HammerTap, a company that provided tools for eBay sellers (http://digbig.com/4epgs).
On March 8, 2001, a federal grand jury in Sacramento returned an indictment against Ken Walton, Ken Fetterman and Scott Beach, charging them with participating in a scheme to fraudulently bid on hundreds of art auctions on eBay, including one in which an eBay user was induced to bid over $135,805 for a fake Richard Diebenkorn painting. The indictment alleged that the defendants created more than 40 User IDs on eBay using false registration information, and then used those aliases to place fraudulent bids to artificially inflate the prices of literally hundreds of paintings they auctioned on eBay from November 1998 to June 2000.
Kenneth Walton and Scott Beach pled guilty on April 17, 2001, to one count of wire fraud and three counts of mail fraud and in return agreed to testify against their cohort Kenneth Fetterman.
Fetterman fled to Lake Tahoe and was on the run for nearly two years before he was nabbed in Wichita, on his way to a Frisbee tournament (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-05-27-ebay-art-fraud_x.htm).
According to a 2004 Media Bistro blog entry (http://digbig.com/4epfp), the book was originally going to be called, "FAKE! Forgery, Lies, and eBay Or, How I Learned to Commit Art Fraud which Sparked an International Scandal that Rocked the eBay Universe." The blog said of the book, "The author traces how he went from being a relatively normal middle-class kid with a young law practice to being on the front page of the New York Times at the center of an international scandal, revealing the vagaries of the art world, the seduction of eBay selling, and the tricks of his mind that allowed him to rationalize his growing fraudulent behavior."
Walton sold HammerTap in February 2004, and his book deal was fodder for book-industry blogs by November.
Simon Spotlight Entertainment is publishing the book, which is due out in April 2006 and is priced at $21.95. A call to the publisher to learn more was not returned.
