I almost bought a Submariner...

[m j b]

... off of another forum. Why? Well, because I was bored. And so I used watchrecon to find subs for sale, found a nice one on WUS and emailed the seller. He responds, I reply, he responds. Not particularly forthcoming, a bit of an attitude he has, but no flags were raised.

But as you all know, there are approximately 147 million Rolex Submariners out in the world, but Rolex only made 5 million. Yeah, I made that up. But there are an awful lot of fakes, and they are getting really, really good. One can buy from a TS here on TRF, but one will pay a substantial premium for that. The only way to really know that it's real is to buy new, but if you want a 14060M (like I think I do) then you don't have that option.

So this morning I decided to further pursue the sale and emailed the seller and I was going to post some of the pictures here on our "is it fake" forum, and I couldn't find the FS thread. So I look for past posts by the seller, and he's been banned. So they banned him and deleted the thread. Natch they won't tell me why. Privacy. Bah.

Looks like I dodged a bullet there. I guess it wasn't meant to be. But I got really scared thinking about the likelihood of a fake. I've never had an issue buying a used Rolex in the past, although I did get a fake Breitling once which I was fortunately able to return as the seller had no idea it was faked, and he wanted to maintain his excellent eBay feedback rating.