Etsy’s mission statement: ‘Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. It's home to a universe of special, extraordinary items, from unique handcrafted pieces to vintage treasures…. As a company, we strive to lead with our guiding principles and to help spread ideas of sustainability and responsibility whose impact can reach far beyond our own business.’

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.

eBay lead the policing game. No, they are not perfect, but the Authenticity Guarantee offers a second set of eyes on every watch purchased above a threshold value, in a serviced territory.

eBay’s online reporting tool is a little more hit-and-miss – but at least they have one, and if you have connections and persistence, it is possible to get fakes removed.

Vinted used to be awful, but thankfully are better. After long conversations with senior management, the volume of fakes on the site has greatly reduced, and The Watch Scholar now trains their in-person Authentication Team in London.

Unfortunately, Vinted have now implemented a price threshold for luxury watch listings – fake sellers are getting around this with a high headline price and a ‘PM me for the real price’ in the listing.

Etsy launched to showcase artists and makers around the globe, is now home to cheap derivative tat, and fakes…lots of fakes!

The screengrab here started as a search for a specific fake watch, but I progressively reduced my search terms to just ‘Watch’ – and got a screen full of fakes. This particular web page showed 60 watches – out of that, only 3 appeared to be real.

The exit of real artists and makers from Etsy is well documented; Why would you try to stand out in a tide of counterfeit rubbish?

Etsy has a limited reporting function - you can only flag an I.P. infringement if you are the rights holder. This issue has been flagged at the highest levels since 2023, and yet the situation has only got worse.

Etsy, when other platforms have been forced to implement change, Etsy’s inaction looks a lot like complicity- happy to earn fees from the listing, selling, processing, and promotion of fake watches?