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Kenneth Fetterman is a famous art scam artist who occasionally partnered with Kenneth Walton to sell very expensive counterfeit art on rigged auctions on eBay. [1] [2]
One of his partners in the shill bidding was Kenneth Walton, who had, in May 2000, sold a fake painting that was at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting in an online auction. It was supposedly the undiscovered work of the late Northern California artist Richard Diebenkorn. However, the fraud was discovered, and after Walton was investigated, it was uncovered that Walton, Scott Beach, and Fetterman were involved in a shill bidding ring and that Fetterman had faked many paintings. After running from the authorities using various aliases and living off his fake paintings he was selling on eBay, he was finally caught indicted by a federal grand jury for rigging art auctions on eBay. In May 2004, Fetterman was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison. [3]
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A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps or gives credibility to a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with said person or organization. Shills can carry out their operations in the areas of media, journalism, marketing, politics, sports, confidence games, cryptocurrency, or other business areas. A shill may also act to discredit opponents or critics of the person or organization in which they have a vested interest.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that brokers customer to customer and retail sales through online marketplaces in 32 countries. Sales occur either via online auctions or "buy it now" instant sales, and the company charges commissions to sellers upon sales. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995.
Art forgery is the creation and sale of works of art which are falsely credited to other, usually more famous artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler.
Ely Sakhai is an American art dealer and civil engineer who owned Manhattan art galleries The Art Collection and Exclusive Art. He was later charged and convicted for selling forged art and was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for fraud. After his release he continued to operate The Art Collection in Great Neck, New York.
An online auction is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
Louis Jay Pearlman was an American talent manager and scam artist. He was the person behind many successful 1990s boy bands, having formed and funded the Backstreet Boys. After their massive success, he then developed NSYNC.
A bidding fee auction, also called a penny auction, is a type of all-pay auction in which all participants must pay a non-refundable fee to place each small incremental bid. The auction is extended each time a new bid is placed, typically by 10 to 20 seconds. Once time expires without a new bid being placed, the last bidder wins the auction and pays the amount of that bid. The auctioneer profits from both the fees charged to place bids and the payment for the winning bid; these combined revenues frequently total more than the value of the item being sold. Empirical evidence suggests that revenues from these auctions exceeds theoretical predictions for rational agents. This has been credited to the sunk cost fallacy. Such auctions are typically held over the Internet, rather than in person.
Auction sniping is the practice, in a timed online auction, of placing a bid likely to exceed the current highest bid as late as possible—usually seconds before the end of the auction—giving other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. This can be done either manually or by software on the bidder's computer, or by an online sniping service.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a museum of American art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The museum, founded by Alice Walton and designed by Moshe Safdie, officially opened on 11 November 2011. It offers free public admission.
Heffel Fine Art Auction House is a division of Heffel Gallery Limited. Heffel maintains offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
Judith Helen Dobrzynski is an American journalist and instructor in journalism. She is currently a freelance writer who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, business, philanthropy and other topics to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and several magazines.
Heritage Auctions is an American multi-national auction house based in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1976, Heritage is an auctioneer of numismatic collections, comics, fine art, books, luxury accessories, real estate, and memorabilia from film, music, history, and sports.
eBay has experienced controversy, including cases of fraud, its policy requiring sellers to use PayPal, and concerns over forgeries and intellectual property violations in auction items.
The art student scam is a confidence trick in which cheap, mass-produced paintings or prints are misrepresented as original works of art, often by young people pretending to be art students trying to raise money for art supplies or tuition fees. The sellers mostly represented themselves as French art students, but the scam has recently been copied internationally, with instances of Chinese, Chilean, Nigerian and other nationalities posing as art students or dealers in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States since around 2000. The art is often sold in exhibition sites or art galleries. Many scammers operate alongside and at the long-run expense of genuine art students who show their yearly work in festivals during the summer vacation.
Many unusual items have been listed for sale on the auction website eBay. Some sold while other auctions were stopped by eBay because the listing breached their policies.
M. Knoedler & Co. was an art dealership in New York City founded in 1846. When it closed in 2011, amid lawsuits for fraud, it was one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US, having been in operation for 165 years.
Wolfgang Beltracchi is a German art forger and visual artist who has admitted to forging hundreds of paintings in an international art scam netting millions of euros. Beltracchi, together with his wife Helene, sold forgeries of alleged works by famous artists, including Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger, and Kees van Dongen. Though he was found guilty for forging 14 works of art that sold for a combined $45m (£28.6m), he claims to have faked "about 50" artists. The total estimated profits Beltracchi made from his forgeries surpasses $100m.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is a large acrylic-on-canvas pop art painting by British artist David Hockney, completed in May 1972. It measures 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m), and depicts two figures: one swimming underwater and one clothed male figure looking down at the swimmer. In November 2018, it sold for US$90.3 million, at that time the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting by a living artist.