Quote:
Originally Posted by asiparks
I don't think anyone is arguing that hundreds or thousands of fake Rolex are slipping through the hands of Grey unnoticed.
The question is "Could a fake slip through unnoticed?"
I don't know the answer to that, because I don't know the actual steps DavidSW/Takuya/OCRolex to verify the watches they sell. Do they open and check every watch, or only those where something might look a bit off ? ( some might venture that they don't need to when they come direct from ADs...)
And "over many years " doesn't count- times are changing : the sophistication of fakes has leapt ahead massively this past few years right as the Rolex secondary market has skyrocketed, creating a perfect market for the unscrupulous to make a shit ton of money from giddy FOMO buyers.
I would guess that the Trusted Sellers here are well informed as to what to look for on the state of the art fakes, but those on this forum are only a small part of the reseller market.
High fidelity fakes aren't just made for enthusiast collectors of such things, they are made to be sold as real, and it would be foolish to think that thousands aren't getting mixed into the secondary market and being unwittingly bought and resold either privately or via less assiduous resellers.
Outside of this forum and fake watch forums, how many buyers of a used Rolex will actually send it off to RSC for a service to check authenticity ? Come to that, how many on this forum actually do that ? A minority for sure.
Looking at some of the responses in the Watchout section, many on here have absolutely no idea how sophisticated fakes are and believe they can tell fake from real by "feel" or "shine" or "weight" or "the feel of winding it". People who sell fakes love confident people like that...
So it's not paranoia, there is no question that the clones/fakes are circulating hence it's minimizing the risks of spending tens of thousands of dollars on something actually worth ~$700.
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"Could a fake slip through unnoticed?" Valid question but at this point of uncertainty we might as well go over to the meteorite forum and ask if we could get hit in the head with a rock. The answer of course is yes. The real question is how likely is it.
Rolex has been and remains one of the most counterfeited brands on the planet. What objective measurement do we have that "the sophistication of fakes has leapt ahead massively these last few years" besides YouTube videos and histrionic posts on watch forums? And making flawless watches costs money especially when you have to mimic precise cosmetic characteristics of the most observed Swiss watch brand in the world. Where is the tipping point that a copy is both so flawless that experts can't tell and also so cheap enough to produce clandestinely?
I mean this thread is just a big social experiment in What-if-ism. We can all be fooled any number of times at any point in a given day. We do our research, we study, we ask for referrals and we apply the smell test. Is any of this fake watch drama possible? Of course. Is any of this likely? No. Is any of this rampant? Absolutely not.
I'm going to focus on two out of three and not worry about it.