If you want to sell a fake watch, sell it on Etsy!

Online marketplaces are hard to police; we know this. You want to make onboarding as easy as possible to attract sellers, but you can’t be sure as to what the user will want to sell.

Your Terms and Conditions might forbid the sale of counterfeit goods, but bad actors never follow T&Cs - if T&Cs are to have any meaning, you need to police them.

Wired: We Bought a $500 Counterfeit Luxury Watch. Nobody Could Spot the Difference.

This article by WIRED lifts the lid on the shadowy world of the Rep-Community and shows just how convincing modern counterfeit watches can be.

Don’t trust your AI with watch research By @A Watch Critic & @Kingflum

This is an eye-opening long read for anyone who works with watches and AI, and suggests the very real possibility that we are seeing the destruction of informative and accurate research, quicker than you think.

Watch Authentication - Where is your data from, and how clean is it?

If there is one element that AI needs more than anything else, it is data. And, according to AI itself, that data needs to be ‘clean, consistent, and well-organised input to reduce errors and bias.’

Fakes and Frankenwatches: What the eye can’t see, you (or AI) can’t judge.

It is, frustratingly, a very common post on social platforms... two watches, side by side, shot from straight on, with a challenge to judge which is real or fake... Yes, we’ve all seen them, time and time again- nothing new!

My main issue with these challenges is that they reduce the practice of authentication only to what you can see from the front.

Can you trust a 'Proof of Purchase'?

When buying a watch, lending against a watch, or insuring a watch, that accompanying proof of purchase receipt should provide peace of mind…or does it?

Not only can your fake watch sit in a fake box with a matching fake warranty card, but the proof of purchase backing it can be fake too!

Do Rolex really care about fakes?

The July 2025 OECD report ‘Counterfeiting, Piracy and the Swiss Economy 2025’ claimed an annual loss of $1.4bn to the Swiss Watch industry.

If true, as by far the most widely faked watch brand, Rolex would have borne the brunt of that loss, and yet they seem to be doing OK financially.

The New Rolex Datejust 41 – Green Lacquer Ombré Dial

Launched on the 14th of April 2026… Faked less than 2 weeks later.

The Chinese counterfeit production line is quick - 12 days from authentic launch images of the fake versions appear on Social Media.

The real thing won’t arrive in stores for weeks, or on the secondary market for possibly a few months, so your chance of having the genuine article to compare it to is minute.

Is AI another case of ‘Over-promise, Under-deliver’?

During The Watch Scholar Authentication courses, the question I always get asked, ‘Can’t AI do this?’ or ‘Surely AI would know the difference immediately?’.

It is only when we break down what exactly would be necessary to train an AI on a single model reference from a single brand, that the scale of the task becomes clear.