Kenneth Walton, a lawyer and ex-Fort Lewis soldier, was a practicing attorney when he discovered he could make a lot of money selling paintings on eBay. The trouble was, his paintings were fake and when he got caught, it set off a worldwide scandal.

Kenneth Walton

He was once the most famous part-time art dealer in America, earning up to $40,000 extra dollars per month selling paintings not in galleries but on eBay.

"I got the kind of rush out of it that people would describe from gambling when they would win," he said.

His winning streak lasted nearly two years. But when he pressed his luck by cheating, Walton lost everything.

"I just wanted to back away and run away from it all," he said. "Pretend it never happened. But it was too late."

The story began in 1987. He was stationed at Fort Lewis when he met Kenneth Fetterman.

"He had an incredible knowledge of art that went beyond anything that anybody could derive from academic study," he said.

Ten years later, Fetterman showed up at Walton's Sacramento law office and convinced Walton to help him sell hundreds of cheap paintings on eBay.

"Right off the bat I was making a couple thousand dollars a month and that quickly escalated from there," he recalled.

From the very beginning, Walton says he and Fetterman used fake user names to bid against each other and drive up prices.

Over an 18-month period, they made hundreds of thousands of dollars on eBay.

Then they got too greedy. They went for the big kill led to their own demise.

Their downfall was an $8 abstract Walton bought in a junk shop.

"I found a painting that looked a lot like an early 50's work by an artist named Richard Diebenkorn," he said. "And I put his initials down at the corner of it and I put a 52 for the year… I said I got this big abstract art painting at a garage sale in Berkeley a long time ago back in my bachelor days and then I got married and my wife has not let me keep it in the house. She says it looks like it was done by a nut case."

If the description sounds naïve, that was the idea.

Walton had stepped over the edge. This was felony forgery.

The fake Diebenkorn sold for more than $135,000.

The sale made headlines. Overnight, he became the dad who found the $135,000 painting in the garage. Only he wasn't a dad and he wasn't married.

Walton's story and his life began to unravel. First came reporters, then the FBI. Eventually Walton agreed to plea-bargain, but it took another three years for investigators to catch Fetterman.

"He was pretending to be Stone Gossard, the guitarist in Pearl Jam, the great Seattle band," he said.

Fetterman served 30 months in prison and hasn't been heard from since.

"He probably could have been a great self-taught art dealer if he wanted, but he took short cuts," said Walton.

Walton wrote about the whole experience in his book "Fake, Forgery, Lies, & eBay."

When asked if he thinks art fraud is still happening online, he said: "I think art fraud is just as bad if not worse than it ever was on eBay. A lot of people are trying to pass off fakes the way we once did and using techniques that we never even thought of back then."

eBay disputes those claims. They say new technology and the eBay community itself can detect fraud more quickly than ever.

Besides, eBay has banned Kenneth Walton for life.

But if you type in "fake" and "forgery" on eBay, you might be surprised whose book pops up on the screen.

eBay says it is much better at detecting fraud now, partly because eBay employs thousands of people who check bidding patterns for irregularities. the company's best resource to uncover fraud, however, is the customers themselves. "There are 89 million listings on eBay, 6 million going up every day," a spokesman said. "People from communities and are fast to detect problems."