Peter Vink - art fraud on TradeMe

Potential buyers can ask sellers questions on their auctions, and the answers are visible to anyone viewing the page. Vink quickly developed an aggressive attitude towards some questioners.

People who pointed out that he'd painted the sun rising in the West, or that he had a peninsular facing in the wrong direction, were quickly put in their place.

Anyone upsetting Mr Vink via the Q&A section quickly found themselves blacklisted, unable to ask questions or place a bid on his auctions.

Vink the money machine

Vink's work continued to sell well. His listings had a distinctive style. There were usually three photographs on his auctions. The full work, a closer photo to show detail, and a third image lifted from furniture catalogues showing a sofa, with Vink's work badly Photoshopped onto the wall behind. For an artist, perspective wasn't one of his strong points.

In fact Vink had no idea of perspective. Take this image of his "studio" which he featured on his website to persuade potential buyers that he was a genuine artist.

Note the three badly added artworks at top left, and the poorly PhotoShopped doors on the right. And if he's an artist, where's the easel? Vink was about to be exposed as a fraud.

And that's not all...

Some of the more eagle-eyed ScamBusters began to notice similarities between Vink's works and photographs they'd found on the net. Take this beach sunset piece.

Vink said: "Welcome Bay is situated near Tauranga, I was born here so the area has a special meaning to me."

However the work was copied from a photograph of a beach in Spain taken by one Michael Bussell. We quickly learned that almost all of Vink's "works" had been ripped off from professional photographers around the world.

This photo of a lake in Switzerland (copyright EdenPix) became "Lake Hayes - just a stone's throw from Arrowtown."

You can find numerous other examples of Vink's copyright breaches in our Vink/Finn photocopy gallery.

TradeMe wouldn't remove items for copyright breach unless they were contacted by the original copyright owners.

ScamBusters contacted as many photographers as we could locate and some of Vink's auctions finally began to get pulled by TradeMe management.

ScamBusters concluded that Vink was having his "originals" painted to order in Asia. His role was merely as an importer who signed the works in his own name with a silver pen.

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