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The Truth About Fakes: Part 2

written by A.Morgan - 6th Feb 2012

Last week we showed you two watches – both seemingly the same – one of which was a fake (see here). We asked you to tell us which one you thought was the fake and why, and many of you responded, with mixed responses. Well, now we can finally reveal that it was, in fact, watch number one that was the counterfeit, which many of you correctly guessed. Let’s run through the differences between the original, genuine model, and the fake:

All these details are distinctly obvious under good lighting and high magnification, but take that away and things become infinitely harder. Look at the fake in isolation and the chances of spotting it become virtually nil.

The fake watch industry makes up 7% of worldwide watch trade, siphoning off $1 billion in profit every single year from the brands they mimic. The sale of counterfeit watches actually surpasses the genuine in volume by quite some margin, shifting 40 million units compared to the 26 million genuine. It is often used as a method for laundering money earned through more serious crime like drug trafficking.

Given this, it makes the likelihood of coming across a fake at some point in your watch buying career extremely probable. Expecting to know every single tell of all the best fakes is akin to memorising the complete works of Dickens in several languages, and even then you’d need the vision of a superhero through which to see them. As ever, our advice is to cut out the risk and buy safely, from people who you trust as experts and will give you full support should something be amiss.

So, just to make the point, here’s the Breitling again, at 1:1 scale, on its own. So; real or fake?