Why eBay Is an Art Forger’s Paradise

When art enthusiasts go shopping for original Warhols, Picassos, and Basquiats on eBay, they are easy prey for forgers and scam artists.

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Henry Stephenson is a self-described art addict. The walls of his Washington, D.C., home are collages of framed paintings, lithographs, and drawings, the culmination of a lifetime collecting art. In his early 30s, he bought his first investment piece from a local gallery: a large Marc Chagall lithograph. “It was one of 50 first editions and signed,” he says. “There was no question of its authenticity.”

In the early 2000s, after splitting with his wife of 20 years, Stephenson began devoting more time to his interest in art. But he wasn’t a habitué of New York’s auction houses, where work by big-name artists was assiduously authenticated and regularly went for staggering prices. Instead, he was bargain hunting, trawling eBay for Picassos, Moreaus, and Dalis.

Stephenson became “hooked on eBay,” collecting a dozen pieces over a five-year period from the same reseller: several small Picasso watercolors at roughly $1,000 a piece, a handful of Moreaus, and a few Dali etchings, many of which were believed to have been missing. “So I’m thinking to myself, ‘I bet this guy has some of those lost pieces,’” says Stephenson.

Today, Stephenson is cooperating with a federal investigation of the eBay reseller whom he purchased these works from. And his story is all too common. Since its inception, experts say, eBay has become a den of art forgery, an unregulated market where ignorant art enthusiasts are easy prey for forgers and scam artists.

It doesn’t take much effort to find big-ticket pieces sold by anonymous users complete with dubious certificates of authenticity, provenances, and other documents to boost the works’ credibility. (I sent a series of messages to an eBay seller in Hungary requesting further information and documentation on “original” Warhols and Basquiats, to no response.)

Despite recent high-profile prosecutions of forgers, experts say that a large number of collectors are still being duped when buying fine art online.

Connecticut gallerist David Crespo found himself in a similar situation when he was charged with mail and wire fraud in 2012 after selling forged work both on eBay and out of his gallery. After Sotheby’s declared 21 “original” Picassos he purchased for less than $50,000 on eBay to be fake, Crespo nevertheless resold them on the open—and less discerning—market.

In late June, John Re was arrested on charges of engaging in an eBay forgery scheme that earned him $1.9 million. Re is accused of starting an eBay forgery operation in 2005, telling private collectors that he’d stumbled on a cache of Jackson Pollock paintings in 1999 while cleaning out an elderly woman’s estate in Long Island, New York. Fifty-eight of the works Re is accused of selling went to the same collector for $519,890, the paintings ranging in price from $1,000 to $60,000; 12 others were allegedly sold to a different collector for $894,500; and three others allegedly to a third collector for $475,000.

And in April, a Florida pastor named Kevin Sutherland was convicted of trying to sell fraudulent Damien Hirst paintings. Sutherland had unwittingly purchased the paintings from a forger in California on eBay. But when he took them to Sotheby’s in New York to be appraised and auctioned, the house responded that it couldn’t authenticate the work. (They had contacted Damien Hirst’s camp in London, which declared the paintings fake). He might have been a victim of fraud when initially purchasing the paintings, but Sutherland was later arrested after he attempted to offload the paintings for $175,000 to an undercover detective.

“Art fraud is a confidence crime that takes two willing participants,” says Colette Loll, an expert in art fraud who consults with eBay and has trained federal agents in forgery investigations. “People still believe that there are all these treasures out there and that they’re going to be the ones to discover them,” says Loll. “There’s still this Antiques Roadshow mentality infiltrating the online art marketplace.”

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