By Dan Taylor
In May of 2000, growing auction giant eBay made international headlines when a painting sold on the site for a breathtaking six-figure sum. Posted by a novice seller named "golfpoorly," the item's description indicated that he'd found the large piece of abstract art years before at a Berkeley, California garage sale.

Collectors, noticing a small "RD52" in the corner of the painting, speculated that the piece was an unknown work by renowned American artist Robert Diebenkorn. Over the course of the auction bids shot up from the opening price of 25 cents to a staggering $135,805.

What should have been a public relations bonanza turned into a humiliating nightmare when it was revealed that "golfpoorly" was hardly a novice seller. He was actually California lawyer Ken Walton (www.kennethwalton.com), an art hobbyist who had been dabbling in fraudulent and illegal practices on the site since the late 1990s.

As for the painting, it, too, was a fake.

In the years before the sale Walton had sold paintings of suspect origin provided by an old Army acquaintance named Ken Fetterman, a con man with a colorful past unknown to him. With the Diebenkorn painting, however, Walton had crossed into new territory – forgery.

As he details in the riveting new book, FAKE: Forgery, Lies & eBay (Simon & Schuster), Walton added the telltale "RD52" to a painting he knew could be mistaken for the artist's style.

"If the world hadn't taken notice at that point," he said in a recent interview, "I don't know when, or if, I would have stopped."

But the world – and reporters from some of the nation's leading newspapers – did take notice. It wasn't long before the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others were poking large holes in Walton's story and the auction was coming under fire, not just from the press and the eBay community, but the federal government, too.

"At every stage I kept thinking, 'This is it, it can't get any worse," Walton told me. "And it did."

By the time the story had unraveled, Fetterman was on the run from federal authorities and Walton struck a deal to testify against his partner-in-crime. With his license to practice law in jeopardy, Walton turned to computer programming and started Hammer Tap, a company that provided research for eBay sellers.

Determined to cut their ties with the man who had given the site a black eye, eBay forced Walton to sell the company rather than have him associated with the site. Banned from having any connection – directly or indirectly – with eBay appears to have stung Walton, but not because of the monetary loss.

"I don't think about eBay so much anymore," he said. "Sometimes I do regret that I screwed up something that could have been a lifelong, enjoyable hobby."

Unlike many crime tell-all authors, Walton takes no pleasure in his deeds and never revels in pulling the wool over the eyes of art experts and collectors – if only for a brief period. The book resonates with genuine regret and Walton expertly portrays the fear he felt that his actions or the change in prosecution might damage the deal his lawyer had negotiated.

"As painful and as shameful and as hurtful to other this whole process was, it really set my life on a better course," he confided. "I learned a lot about myself and I think the benefits of that in the long run will outweight the detriments."

"But it was a tough price to pay."

Dan Taylor is a freelance writer and the editor of Inside Collecting as well as the Inside Collecting Blog. After amassing a huge collection of "stuff" at garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores he began selling on eBay in the late 1990s. Today he is an eBay Power Seller and acts as a Trading Assistant.