Looking for cheap watches on the internet" Better think twice before making that purchase. In this in-depth feature from the WatchTime archives, we explore how sales of these counterfeit watches are hurting both collectors and the watch industry.
For some watch collectors, the temptation is just too much. ?I have seen quite respectable watch collectors with nice collections who couldn?t get their hands on that one limited-edition piece that they wanted,? says Beatrice de Quervain, a veteran U.S. watch executive and most recently head of Hublot North America. ?They always buy from their authorized dealer, but then, just for that one piece, they broke down and went to an unauthorized source on the Internet. And sure enough, they got burned. They paid $20,000, $25,000.? What they got, de Quervain says, was a counterfeit. A counterfeit Rolex watch seized by German customs officials in 2012
De Quervain?s comments came at a recent meeting of the American Watch Association to discuss the problem of counterfeit watches. AWA invited WatchTime to sit in on the meeting.
The message from the assembled watch company executives and their legal counsels is that, more than ever, watch collectors must be aware ? and beware ? of the dangers of buying brand-name luxury watches through unauthorized dealers, particularly retail watch sites on the Internet.
That?s because of a recent spike in production of so-called ?superfakes,? counterfeit reproductions of popular name-brand models, made ...