Oil Trader Andy Hall Nipped By $676,250 Art Forgery

I say nipped because Mr. Hall has lost more than the value of the forgery in an hour (and done it more than once with his stubborn long oil positions since $114 in June 2014)

From Art Market Monitor:

Collector Andrew Hall Victim of Leon Golub Forgery Scheme

The New York Times has the story of an unlikely set of Leon Golub forgeries that passed through Sotheby’s and Christie’s before going to leading collector Andrew Hall. The cache of two dozen works by a not-especially valuable painter is likely to cause far more damage to everyone’s reputation than the $676,250 that Hall spent on the fakes.
The NYTimes’s Dealbook has the details:

Mr. Hall started collecting Golub’s work in 2003 and within six years he had amassed 40 pieces, wagering that Golub’s work was undervalued and due to appreciate. In 2011, he discovered that the professor, Lorettann Gascard of Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, shared his passion for Golub’s art. She and her son, Nikolas, seemed to have a collection of Golubs to rival his own, he learned, and they wanted to sell.

Mr. Hall had, it turned out, already bought eight of their Golubs through auction houses in New York beginning in 2009. And after making direct contact with the Gascards in 2011 he bought another 16 from them, cutting out the middleman.

But now he says all 24 of the Golubs he bought from the Gascards are fake. […]

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Hall is a pretty big deal in the collecting world, even putting on a semi-annual show at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.