Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay by Kenneth Walton

This book came to be in my possession thanks to my being at the library for some new reading material when I knew I needed to be home for dinner in thirty.  I'm very choosy about books and like to spend a good hour or so perusing the shelves before I settle on one, so this was no good, no good at all.  I ended up just rushing through the non-fiction section and grabbing a hold of this memoir by chance, thinking it looked interesting enough.

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.

Thanks, Publisher's Weekly!

Turns out I made a lucky grab because this book was absolutely ADDICTING! I kid you not! It was so interesting to see all the ins and outs of the online auction world and how easily manipulated it was in its early days. The tricks and tactichs that eBay conmen of the late '90s were so simple yet so effective that it's appallingly hilarious.   Making money illegally was so simple and so lucrative back then that I probably would have done it, too, had I been in the same situation as Walton.

I will say that by the end of the book I started to get a little worn out. No longer was the focus on being sneaky dealers of possibly forged paintings and the methods employed to do so, but on the legal side of it all and the proceedings in court that followed. This second part was much less interesting to me than the first and led my overall opinion of the book to drop a bit.  But only a bit!
 
What else can I say about this book?  It's a quick read and Walton's narration clips along at a decent pace to keep the story moving forward without sacrificing technical detail.  He has a subtle, dry sense of humor that tickled my love for sarcasm and intellectual wit, and the fact that it's all 100% true somehow makes it all the more unbelievable.  There's no one particular age group or type of person that this book appeals to--it's something truly anyone can appreciate, tying in everything from technology to crime to humor to the natural fallacy of humanity.  Kudos to Walton for creating such a widely appealing memoir; it's a hard feat to accomplish.

So my opinion by now should be obvious.  I really liked this book.  I liked this book a lot.  I liked this book so grab your nook and download it on the spot!  8/10