eBay Con Man Writes Book, Starts Over

Sooner or later we all get conned on eBay in one form or another.

Perhaps an item we buy never arrives. Maybe it arrives but isn't in quite the condition it was advertised in. Sometimes a buyer decides to back out of an auction, often employing such tall tales as "I've been in the hospital," "a family member died" or (as I heard recently) "my wife died and paying for the item isn't my top priority."

They must have paid for the other items they bought that same day and in the days after before their grief really took hold. Oh, and just for the record, I've been buying and selling on eBay for more than seven years and have had each of those examples happen to me.

But I've never fallen victim to what I would call an outright con. The examples above seem more like simple fraud or bidders who feel like eBay will never catch up to them (though they always seem to, as my non-paying widower found out when he was NARU'd).

Ken Walton, on the other hand, was an outright con man. And a lawyer to boot. He started selling garage sale and thrift store finds on eBay, then graduated to selling forged art and other items. It's all detailed in his new book, FAKE: Forgery, Lies & eBay and you can read more about Walton's story at his own site and in this article.