Weidenfeld £9.99 pp298

“This happened.” With these two words Kenneth Walton claims veracity for his confessions of a con artist. And with internet fraud on the increase, it’s a timely reminder of how dangerous it is to buy art online. He writes with pace, style and tension — everything a crime story needs. The facts are believable; but, having shown drafts to many, including a novelist, Walton has certainly learnt how to tell a good tale. If this is truth, it is like a coin that has flipped and run, landing in fictional terrain.

The story is an up-to-date Rake’s Progress, and the term Hogarth used for such paintings, “Modern Moral Subjects”, applies equally well to this fable. Walton goes from innocence to corruption as he loses his naivety and engages in increasingly fraudulent tactics. Two good women, one after the other, try without success to intercede and save him from ruin.

It begins when, bored with his job in the third largest law firm in Sacramento, he goes shopping for art in thrift stores. His companion is the crass and boorish Fetterman, whom he first met in the army. Fetterman shows Walton how easy it is to make a quick profit on pictures by selling them on eBay. Watching him at work on this online auction site, Walton notices that Fetterman, employing a different user ID, bids on an item he is trying to sell. Why? “Just helping it along a little,” Fetterman replies.

It is 1998. A few years before, while Walton was at law school in San Francisco, the dotcom boom had exploded around him, with Yahoo!, AltaVista and Netscape setting up in Silicon Valley, while at Stanford University two bright graduates were dreaming up Google; eBay, then called AuctionWeb, was being built by a software engineer in a condominium in San Jose. Walton, already losing interest in law, wanted to be part of this revolution.

By the time he starts selling art online, eBay is attracting thousands of gullible bidders. Able to operate in this vast, largely unmonitored marketplace from the privacy of his own home, Walton quickly becomes savvy at selling, attracting bargain hunters by pretending to be more naive about pictures than he is. At first, he doesn’t realise that the initials or signatures that appear on the paintings that Fetterman asks him to sell are forged. They provoke a lot of interest, which both men push higher by means of “shills”, a term that historically referred to bids placed either by the owner of the item for sale or by the auction house itself. By now, Walton, like Fetterman, has a fistful of user IDs. Almost inadvertently, he becomes part of a shill-bidders’ ring.

Fetterman is the one with the greatest nerve. When a buyer doubts the authenticity of a painting on offer, Fetterman sends him a letter, claiming that he is writing a book on this artist and wants to use this picture as the frontispiece. But the media glare turns first on Walton when an abstract, on which he has forged Richard Diebenkorn’s signature, attracts a large price. Exposed on the front page of The New York Times, his fraudulent dealings lead to an FBI investigation, and prosecution. The slow unfolding of his crime makes tense reading, for Walton, as is the way with rakes, is part venal, part victim. The reader may feel that the real ogre in this story is eBay, because of the unpoliced deceptions and questionable merchandise it has spawned.

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