One in ten traded Rolex watches are fakes and rising sophistication makes them incredibly difficult to spot

One in ten of the luxury watches offered for sale to Watchfinder in the past year have been found to be fakes, according to the company’s CEO Arjen van de Vall.

Around half of all those watches are knock off Rolexes.

The Richemont-owned pre-owned specialist conducts a thorough authentication process on every watch it receives, and the rise of super fakes is becoming an alarming problem, he says in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.

Black market threat intelligence agency Havocscope estimates that 40 million counterfeit watches are sold globally each year, generating profit of roughly $1 billion.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for anybody other than watchmaking experts to separate the real from the fake.

“The level of sophistication is increasing significantly,” Mr van de Vall says.

“We have a check list when our watchmakers see a watch. In the old days, around 20% of watches would require further inspection to understand it if they were fake. Today, it is around 80% of watches that need this thorough testing and inspection to see if they are genuine or not,” he explains.

Watchfinder has a 60-step process that includes inspecting watches cosmetically, removing the case back to check the movement if there are suspicions, matching serial numbers to what is stated on any documentation, and ensuring the watch has not been registered with any lost or stolen databases.

“As one of the leaders in this segment, we encourage everybody to adopt similar practices. It is not just about fake watches, it is also about lost and stolen watches,” Mr van de Vall urges.

Fakes are increasingly difficult to spot because they are being made in a similar way to the real thing, and sometimes with a mix of real and counterfeit parts.

Super-fake producers use the same equipment and tools as leading Swiss manufacturers and have highly trained watchmakers using the same techniques to assemble and finish the watches, Mr van de Vall describes.