FWIW, turns out correct that unless one can tell fake from genuine, ideally by touch & feel, one best not collect, whether watch or gold
economist.com
A vintage watch broke auction records. Then the rumours started
As demand for luxury watches has rocketed, the business has become beset by skulduggery
Jan 9th 2026
By Emma Irving
It took just 14 minutes to cause consternation in the watch world. On November 5th 2021 the bidding opened on a vintage Omega watch at the Geneva branch of Phillips, a British auction house. Aurel Bacs, the auctioneer, had a reputation for drumming up record-breaking prices. Yet the watch, a Speedmaster Broad Arrow from 1957, had a fairly low starting price for its type—just SFr60,000 ($66,000 at the time).
The watch was an early version of the model that became known as the “Moonwatch”, after Buzz Aldrin wore one during the first lunar landing. It had a coveted “tropical” brass dial, meaning that its colour had changed as it aged, from black to a rich chocolate brown. Other than that, there was little to distinguish it from the many other Speedmasters that are auctioned by Phillips each year. Nor was this watch immaculate: it had several blemishes, including a long scratch on the dial.
Sacha Davidoff, a Geneva-based dealer, had a client who was interested in buying an early-series Speedmaster with a tropical dial. But Davidoff thought the watch on the auction floor was so unremarkable that he slipped out with a friend for chips and a beer. It “felt like it had been fiddled with”, he told me later: he thought the dial had been restored and that the bezel, the ring that surrounds it, was not in the same condition as the rest of the watch. These changes were not necessarily the result of malicious intent, but they did mean the watch was not of the highest calibre. “You get the feeling when you have that crusty watch that has never been opened before…when you know it’s been unmolested, untouched, perfect,” Davidoff told me. “And then there’s this type of watch, where you know it’s been through many hands before.”
The Speedmaster’s starting price reflected these reservations; at the time, the record for the model at auction was almost seven times greater. Davidoff advised his client that it was not worth more than $150,000 “all in”.
Davidoff’s friend live-streamed the auction on his phone while they ate. They watched in amazement as the Speedmaster’s price climbed to SFr1m ($1.25m). In the auction room, the audience burst into applause. As the price rose even higher people started to gasp. “And I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’,” Davidoff said. “By the time I walked back, which is not that far, it was at, like, SFr2.7m.”
Davidoff thought the watch on the auction floor was so unremarkable that he slipped out with a friend for chips and a beer. It “felt like it had been fiddled with”
The Speedmaster ultimately sold for SFr3.1m: more than 25 times its upper estimate. Another Speedmaster with a tropical dial in the auction, which Davidoff considered superior because it was “just a pristine, untouched example”, sold for a mere SFr101,000; three others sold for considerably less. To this day, the 1957 Speedmaster Broad Arrow remains the most expensive Omega watch ever sold at auction. “That result pretty much confused everybody. It made people suspicious,” said Davidoff. “I couldn’t believe it was real.”
Watch-collecting used to be considered a dull pursuit, “synonymous to collecting stamps. You’re boring, you’re old, snooze, nobody wants to know,” said Carson Chan, a watch expert, to an audience at a talk in Hong Kong in 2024. Collectors tended to be nerdy and pedantic, finding poetry in the mechanics of micro-rotors or blue-tempered screws. “It’s ultra-precision. Things have to fit so precisely together, or they won’t work,” said Mark Hammerschmidt, a watch collector in Hong Kong, gasping as he opened up the back of a rare watch in front of me.
In general, collectors didn’t swan around conferences or on the party circuit (unlike those in the more glamorous art world); instead, many quietly sought out the watches that brought them the most pleasure. “You fall in love with a Rolex Submariner because you want to be James Bond; you buy an Omega Speedmaster because you fantasise about being an astronaut,” Matt Hranek, a New York-based collector who owns both models, told me. “Really we’re addicts,” Hammerschmidt said, grinning. “Just instead of being addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or drugs, we’re addicted to the chase of acquiring a new watch.”
Indeed, even the richest collectors have to “chase” brand-new luxury watches. Should someone desire, say, a stainless steel Rolex Cosmograph Daytona (retail starting price: $16,000), they must join the years-long waiting lists at official retailers. I approached several licensed Rolex dealerships to find out more about their vetting processes; none of them agreed to an interview. But many industry insiders and collectors told me that it is common for brokers to sell the most popular models only after the clientele agree to buy less desirable watches first (on its website, Rolex notes that it is “not authorised to intervene in the relationship” between these independent dealers and their customers).
In the late 2010s watch manufacturers and dealers began to embrace e-commerce, which made fine watches more accessible to a global audience. Then, when the pandemic began, the market exploded. “I have never seen such a big spike. In 2021, 2022, it was such a crazy moment,” said Chan, who is also a member of the academy of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (a kind of Academy Awards for watches). In 2021 total auction sales of luxury watches rose by 86%, according to an index by Everywatch, a market database. The following year they jumped by another 16%, reaching a peak of $846m. These numbers reflect an especially dramatic increase in the number of people involved in collecting secondhand watches, which now account for more than a third of the global luxury-watch market, according to a study by Deloitte in 2024.
During the pandemic the rich benefited from low interest rates and a thriving stockmarket; stuck at home, they shifted spending from travel to luxury goods. Simultaneously, the increasing value of cryptocurrencies and NFTs created a new wave of buyers who were ready to splash their cash. “It was the hype asset during covid. Nothing else went up as much as watches, except for maybe dogecoin,” said Ben Adams, head of the Asia division at Watch Collecting, an online auction platform established during the pandemic.
Many of these new enthusiasts were young and social-media savvy. Jackie Ho, a Hong Kong-based dealer, remembers “kids in their early 20s just literally rocking up and going, ‘Oh, I like this, I heard about this brand. How much is it? HK$4.5m ($600,000)? Ok, I’ll take it’… just because they saw someone posting on Instagram.”
The surge of interest in watch ownership coincided with the covid-induced suspension of watch manufacturing across Switzerland, which throttled the already-limited supply of new watches. This drove consumers towards suppliers of secondhand watches as well as so-called greymarket dealers, who buy new watches with the goal of selling them on. New digital auction platforms such as Watch Collecting and WatchBox emerged, offering easier access to coveted brands and lower buyer fees than traditional auction houses. Prices for secondhand watches soared. “It was kind of a perfect storm: you had all these cryptocurrency buyers who were big speculators…who were buying Patek Philippes from dealers or the secondary market and then a year later selling them for three times their retail value,” said Adams.
To this day, the 1957 Speedmaster Broad Arrow remains the most expensive Omega watch ever sold at auction
But inevitably, this lucrative market—unregulated and awash with inexperienced customers—attracted some unscrupulous players. People wearing luxury watches became easy targets for thieves: according to a 2024 report by the Watch Register, an online database of lost, stolen and counterfeit watches, more than 100,000 luxury watches have been stolen globally since 2018, with the combined value surpassing $1.9bn. Around a fifth of thefts involve violence, some of it deadly.
Counterfeiting has also become more common. Over the past three years the number of fake watches identified by the Watch Register has more than doubled. According to a report released in 2023 by Watchfinder, a secondhand-watch specialist, at least 40m counterfeit watches are now sold globally each year. And as forgers have invested in superior equipment, their work has become more sophisticated. “Five years ago, 80% of fake watches were recognisable, while only 20% required closer inspection…today, 80% of fake watches are good enough to look real at a glance, and only 20% are obvious fakes,” Watchfinder observed.
Even the most reputable corners of the secondhand-watch world, such as auction houses, are now vulnerable to exploitation. That’s where watch detectives—“seen as pariahs by some in the auction world, but as heroes by many other people”, as Hammerschmidt put it—come in.
Jose Perez has been called the “Sherlock Holmes of vintage watches”. A decade ago he created a database to keep track of watches from Panerai, a luxury Italian brand, of which he was a fan. But as he began to “debunk Panerai myths and falsehoods” for his own enjoyment, he realised the database could serve a broader purpose: helping him to investigate—and publicise—cases of high-end watch fraud.
Perez, who is 52, is as diligent and ruminative as a scholar, but has the tattoos, sunglasses and slicked-back ponytail of a club promoter. He grew up outside Zurich, where watches were “part of the culture”: he recalls playing with his father’s collection when his parents were out of the house. The young Perez also loved detective stories and comics, especially Batman. “He was interesting because he was, in the first place, a very splendid detective,” he told me.
Anatomy of a watch
Bracelet or strapThe bands that secure the watch to the wrist are known as bracelets if they are made out of metal, or straps if they are made out of other materials
CaseThis encloses the inner workings of the watch
CasebackThe lid on the backside of the case. Sometimes these are emblazoned with decorative elements; many Omega watches feature a mythological hippocampus, for example
Serial numberThese can often be found engraved on the caseback or etched on the underside of the lugs, which connect the strap to the case
MovementThe mechanism that makes a watch keep time and “tick”. Secondhand luxury watches are almost exclusively mechanical and require regular maintenance; modern mass-market brands use movements made of quartz, which are more reliable
CrownThe nub on the side of the case that is used to wind mechanical movements and set the time
DialAlso sometimes known as the “face”, this is typically the most distinctive part of the watch. It can feature different colours and styles and be made from a variety of materials, including brass, steel and precious metals
Retaining ringThis is inside the case and holds the movement and dial firmly in place
Hands and time markersHands revolve around the dial to tell the time. The markings on the dial represent divisions of time. These range from Arabic numerals to simple lines to meaningful brand symbols and may be applied with a luminous solution called lume
CrystalThe transparent material that protects the dial. It’s not necessarily made from crystal, though many luxury-watch brands do use sapphire crystal
BezelThe ring that surrounds the crystal. Often, this is made from the same material as the case
After school Perez began an apprenticeship as an industrial mechanic, but gave it up because he didn’t like “having my hands dirty all the time”. He moved into graphic design and then advertising, working in that line for 17 years. During that time he began collecting watches, but he wasn’t able to immerse himself fully in his passion until 2014, when he went on sabbatical (he never returned to advertising).
Whenever Perez adds to his database, which now contains the details of more than 100,000 watches, he starts by documenting the obvious details: serial number, movement type, the kind of dial, bezel and crystal and the condition of the case. Then he notes anything unusual. “All these vintage watches have patina that developed naturally over time, they all have fingerprints…Every dial has marks and stains and discolourations,” he explained.
Perez then uses this information to cross-reference watches, using the many variations of a model documented in his database to spot any anomalies. In 2015, he launched a blog called Perezscope, where he could publish his investigations, which increasingly involved major watch brands.
One of his recent cases involved a Rolex with a purportedly rare prototype of the brand’s “Yacht Master” dial. Perez compared the watch with another one in his database. The new watch’s dial seemed off-kilter; its bezel had been turned clockwise in order to make the skew less obvious. Its “Rolex” logo also had odd serifs (the small lines attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter)—a tell for Italian counterfeiters, who often exaggerated serifs, said Perez. The “15” and “60” numerals were too close to the edge of the dial, while the square time markers were off-centre. And a stamp saying “Singer” (the name of a Swiss dialmaker) on the back of the dial looked different from those found on other pieces. It was “a counterfeit in the truest sense of the word”, Perez concluded.
From the beginning, investigations like these attracted attention. In 2018 Perez exposed a modified dial in a Rolex Daytona sold by Phillips a few years earlier. The auction house swiftly admitted its error and offered the buyer a refund. According to Perez, he was then brought on by Phillips as a freelance specialist, to help prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future. He told me his work for the auction house involved checking images of watches, primarily from Rolex and Panerai, against his database, and claimed to have looked at 30 to 50 watches a year (Phillips disputes Perez’s characterisation of his work for it).
“You fall in love with a Rolex Submariner because you want to be James Bond; you buy an Omega Speedmaster because you fantasise about being an astronaut”
Perez’s encounters with the watch world are often combative. Many watches have sold for far less than expected, or not sold at all, after he identified them as problematic—raising the ire of dealers and auction houses. He told me about a Rolex Oyster “Sotto” Daytona that had been put up for auction in 2021 with a starting bid of HK$8.5m. Perez, who suspected a dealer had installed a more desirable dial in order to quadruple the watch’s value, flagged the watch as suspicious. “When it finally came to auction, it didn’t get one single bid,” he told me gleefully.
Some of the insiders Perez has accused of trickery have resorted to legal challenges, and he’s been trolled on social media, with posts warning that he should “be careful” about what he said. At one point, Perez said, his old address was posted on Instagram, an act he perceived as an attempt to “intimidate” him into silence. When we met in 2024 on the sun-soaked Malaysian island where he spends part of his time, it was in a private room at the back of a sumptuous hotel; he did not want to meet in his home. As he told me over WhatsApp before our interview, “the less people know where I’m staying, the better.”
Yet despite the threats, Perez has become more blunt over time—and his accusations more sweeping. He has written on Perezscope that Monaco’s watch auctions are a “money-laundering paradise”; that the history of Blancpain, a famed watch brand, is “a bunch of baloney”; and that watch auctions are “a Wild West in desperate need of law and order”. He frequently refers to himself in the third person—“an ideal case for Perezscope, I would say”—and claims that he “can literally smell made-up stories from miles away”.
Given his reputation, it’s no surprise that Perez was pulled into the mystery of the Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow. In the hours after the sale at Phillips in 2021, Perez was contacted by three different experts who all thought that the watch was suspiciously similar to one that had been hawked around earlier that year in Swiss watch circles. The distinctive tropical dial looked the same. But in the model seen by the three experts, the lume (glow-in-the-dark material) on the dial was tinged with green, whereas the Speedmaster’s was burnished gold. The two watches had different bezels and hands. Most notably, the movement on the watch that had been offered to the experts suggested that it had been created around a decade later than a 1957 Speedmaster.
Perez began to suspect that the watch sold by Phillips was composed of parts from multiple watches, including the one that had been shown to the three experts. In December he emailed Aurel Bacs, the auctioneer, to ask about the rumours swirling around the Speedmaster’s origins; he never got a reply. A few weeks later, Perez says that he texted Bacs, who then tried to call him, but according to Perez he missed the call and never ended up discussing the watch with Bacs over the phone. (Bacs did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Perez also reached out to Petros Protopapas, then the head of the Omega Museum in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, whom he had known for years. Protopapas was in charge of selecting the most unusual and exceptional Omega watches for the museum’s collection. According to Perez, Protopapas attested that the Speedmaster was a real Omega and that “as long as all the parts are original Omega, it doesn’t matter whether they are mismatched or from different periods”. Perez also says that Protopapas told him that the watch had been bought by “the Ghost”, an elusive Chinese buyer.
An unusual remark made immediately after the sale seemed to substantiate Protopapas’s claim. Bacs asked the Phillips representative who was bidding on behalf of the winner where the Speedmaster’s buyer came from (information about purchasers’ identities is normally strictly guarded). The representative paused dramatically, then said with a grin: “From China with love.”
At this point, Perez, who had never heard of the Ghost before, had no reason to doubt Protopapas. But a few weeks later he spoke to an American dealer who knew the Ghost—and learned that he mostly bought Patek Philippes, making it unlikely that he would spend such an exorbitant sum on an Omega. Then, “I got the feeling that this story wasn’t true,” Perez told me.
To paraphrase Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus paradox, if a watch’s parts are over time entirely replaced with new ones, at what point does it become a different watch? Servicing a watch—something that should be done every ten years—often means replacing some of its parts, which may have degraded with age. “If you own a watch from the 1960s, over the past 60 years you might have taken it somewhere and they might have replaced the hand, replaced the dial,” said Geoff Hess, global head of watches at Sotheby’s.
Perez has written that Monaco’s watch auctions are a “money-laundering paradise”; that the history of Blancpain, a famed watch brand, is “a bunch of baloney”; and that watch auctions are “a Wild West in desperate need of law and order”
Such additions are decorously described as “after-market”. (“We generally don’t say ‘fake’,” said Hess.) They do not preclude a watch from being sold at auction or in high-end dealerships, so long as those replacements are disclosed to a prospective buyer. But because they do tend to result in lower prices, that means there can be financial incentive to hide after-market replacements. “We generally like to strive to find watches that aren’t even polished: they’re untouched, really original…that’s how we get the lofty prices,” explained Hess.
“Frankenwatches” further muddy the waters. These are vintage watches that have been cobbled together with parts from two or more watches, from the same period and the same factory. Sometimes, these watches are original creations, assembled from scratch; other times, certain aspects of a watch are embellished with rarer or fancier parts, which can make the overall piece far more valuable.
There isn’t expert consensus on what constitutes a frankenwatch, or whether they are even a problem for the industry. Luxury brands such as Omega may issue a certificate or warranty of authenticity (which requires a physical inspection) for a watch so long as all the parts are original; they do not necessarily have to be born in one watch. They may also issue a piece of paper called an “extract from the archives”, which simply confirms that a brand made a watch with a specific serial number on a certain date; these do not guarantee authenticity, though some collectors think they add to a watch’s legitimacy.
Auction houses also have different understandings of what constitutes an authentic watch. Cissy Ngan, a watch specialist at Christie’s in Hong Kong, explained that her team defined frankenwatches as having “parts made by a third party”, meaning that the auction house would consider them inauthentic. But if the watch’s components had been replaced during routine servicing by the brand, “these watches are acceptable since all the parts are original from the same brand.” Hess, of Sotheby’s, told me that the most important thing was to make potential buyers aware of any changes to the original watch: “So if we sell a watch with replacement hands—fake after-market hands—it’s OK, as long as you put it in the catalogue.”
This murky state of affairs is further complicated by the fact that there is no single watch-authentication process. Specialists tend to assess provenance (a watch’s history and who is selling it), artistry (what it looks like) and mechanics (how it works). There can be scientific rigour to these analyses: Hess showed me the UV light and Geiger counter he uses to check the lume on vintage-watch dials (the Geiger counter looks for radium, which was phased out of watches by the early 1970s because of its toxicity).
But many experts I spoke to also rely on more nebulous authentication techniques. Ngan told me that Christie’s often reaches out to brands directly for reassurances; the go-ahead of company specialists is considered “the ultimate proof” of a watch’s authenticity. Other experts use their senses. “It sounds ridiculous, but we do an awful lot of sniffing,” said Catherine Alexander, who helps identify stolen or fake watches for the Watch Register. “Does the glue smell right? Does this box smell right?” Alex Yau, an authenticator and dealer in Hong Kong, agreed. “The touch and feel is hard to explain, but from experience we can feel if the watch is different to usual,” he said. “When you touch it, how does the metal sound?”
Yau said he always asks for a second opinion. Even then, “it’s basically impossible for us to be 100% sure on any watch,” he admitted. Hess concurred. “Somebody once told me that this is a business of opinion, not fact,” he told me wryly. Weighing up the “nuances—because this is really a hobby of nuances—comes from lots of experience”.
That’s partly why traditional auction houses remain popular: they are widely considered the most trustworthy places to do business. Most, including Phillips and Sotheby’s, offer refunds if they realise they have sold a watch that had not been described accurately (Hess said this happens “at most” about once a year).
But given the widespread disagreements over what constitutes authenticity, they are still not failsafe places to buy a pristine watch. Alexander told me about a watch that had been sent by an auction house to Cartier for authentication. It was given the all clear, but “it was then picked up by a Cartier expert who identified it as a fake. So it was a fake so good that it even fooled the people who made it. What chance does your average collector have of spotting one of these?”
Despite his suspicions about the Speedmaster Broad Arrow, Perez initially didn’t probe any deeper into the watch’s provenance, given his work for Phillips, the auction house that had sold it. Then, a few months after the sale, he claims he “fell out” with Phillips. Perez says that he had flagged numerous watches as problematic (including a few frankenwatches) only to see them appear at auction. At one point he says he threatened to write an article about a certain watch if it was not withdrawn from an upcoming sale; the auction house pulled the lot. “Then more watches came out that were not OK,” he said. According to Perez, Phillips told him he had been overruled by other experts, but he thought that was an excuse. “I started realising for myself that they were not really interested in me authenticating anything. They were more interested in having me on their payroll to basically keep me quiet.” Towards the end of 2022, he quit.
Bacs asked the Phillips representative who was bidding on behalf of the winner where the Speedmaster’s buyer came from. The representative paused dramatically, then said with a grin: “From China with love”
When approached for comment, a Phillips spokesperson disputed Perez’s characterisation of these events. In clarifying the auction house’s authentication processes, they said that “No timepiece can be offered at a Phillips auction if it has not been thoroughly researched by Phillips’s team of specialists with the help of the manufacturers and their archives (where available), historians, watchmakers and independent specialists.” The spokesperson said that every watch “is sold with a warranty of authenticity”, and that an authentic watch will have a serial number that “corresponds with the record of its manufacture” as well as component parts that were made by the brand and align with the model and its period. “In contrast to watches which have been repaired or restored, inauthentic watches are often created with the intention to deceive,” the spokesperson said, claiming that “if we have any doubts over the authenticity of a watch, we would not offer it for sale.”
Perez was now free to start a “deep dive” into the Speedmaster Broad Arrow case. On April 9th 2023 he published his investigation into the watch’s origins on his blog. He told me that he agreed with the three experts that the tropical dial had been taken from the watch that had been offered for sale in Swiss dealers’ circles in early 2021. He also found that the Speedmaster had the same bezel as one that appeared in a watch sold by Phillips in November 2018. The caseback of the Speedmaster was also suspect: it featured an engraving of a seahorse, but seahorses did not appear on Speedmasters until 1959, two years after the watch was purportedly made.
Perez surmised that the Speedmaster was, in fact, “an assemblage, a Frankenstein watch, that did not leave the Omega factory like that”. A couple of weeks later, in another blogpost, he doubled down: “High-value grails sold at Phillips are, if not questionable in its entirety [...] often made-up Frankenstein watches, assembled from bits and pieces (sometimes even fake ones) and presented with the thumbs-up of revered super scholars as extremely rare and well-preserved examples.”
A month after Perez had published the original blogpost, a Swiss court granted Phillips an injunction against him on the basis of defamation, prohibiting Perez from publishing statements declaring or implying that Phillips engaged in fraudulent conduct or offered any counterfeit or dubiously sourced watches for sale. (A second injunction was granted against Perez in May 2024 and is ongoing.) “I wasn’t troubled because I knew that they didn’t have any jurisdiction where I live,” claimed Perez.
The Speedmaster case
Following the record-breaking sale of the 1957 Speedmaster Broad Arrow in 2021, three industry insiders contacted Perez, pointing out similarities between that watch and another one they had encountered in Swiss watch circles earlier that year. Image: Phillips
The distinctive tropical dial looked the same in both watches. Images: Phillips, left; courtesy of José Perez, right. Diagrams by José Perez
But the lume on the dial of the watch circulated in industry circles was tinged with green, whereas the Speedmaster’s was a burnished gold. Images: Phillips, left; courtesy of José Perez, right. Diagrams by José Perez
The two watches also had different bezels and hands. Most notably, the movement on the watch offered to the experts suggested that it had been created around a decade later than a 1957 Speedmaster. Image: Courtesy of José Perez
In April 2023, Perez published an investigation on his blog, alleging that the Speedmaster was a frankenwatch (a claim later substantiated by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss newspaper). Image: Courtesy of José Perez
Perez agreed with the three industry insiders that the tropical dial had been taken from the watch that had been offered for sale in Swiss watch circles. He also found that Speedmaster had the same bezel as one that appeared in a watch sold by Phillips in 2018. Images: Phillips, above; courtesy of José Perez, below. Diagrams by José Perez
The caseback of the Speedmaster was also suspect: it featured an engraving of a seahorse, but seahorses did not appear on Speedmasters until 1959. Image: Phillips
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Then in June 2023, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), a Swiss newspaper, published an article about the origins of the Speedmaster, which referenced Perez’s work. It, too, claimed that the piece was a frankenwatch, composed of the same high-value tropical dial and bezel pointed out by Perez. In addition, NZZ alleged that whoever had cobbled together the Speedmaster had engraved a serial number from 1957 or 1958 that wasn’t already associated with another watch onto a new movement—thus transforming it into a superficially period-appropriate part. “Without access to the Omega archives, this is virtually impossible,” noted NZZ.
The most shocking part of the article was Omega’s response to these allegations. The chief executive told NZZ that the company had launched an internal investigation and had gathered “clear evidence that three former employees were involved in this operation with clear criminal intent”. The following day, Omega released a statement containing another bombshell: the watch had been bought by the company itself.
That Omega had bid on its own watch was not a huge surprise. Brands sometimes do so to secure the finest pieces for their in-house collections. Bidding at auction also helps to stimulate demand for their watches and keep prices high.
But in its statement, Omega claimed that its three former employees had created a “false legacy” for the watch, which was “an assembly of mostly authentic Omega components”. They had then allegedly purchased it for the Omega museum through a “highly inflated bid through intermediaries, which allowed those involved to collect and distribute the profits generated from the sale”. Omega said that its museum director—Petros Protopapas, Perez’s old contact—had “argu[ed] that it was a rare and exceptional timepiece that would be an absolute must for Omega’s showcase collections, and should therefore be bought in this auction at all cost”. The company claimed that the employees had confessed when confronted with the allegations during the internal investigation, and that it would bring criminal charges against the trio. (It then did so through the Swatch Group, which owns Omega. Any official documentation pertaining to the case is difficult to find, though it appears that it has yet to progress significantly.)
“It’s basically impossible for us to be 100% sure on any watch,” Yau admitted. Hess concurred. “Somebody once told me that this is a business of opinion, not fact”
When I spoke to Protopapas about these allegations, he claimed that he had been asked by Omega’s senior leadership to draw attention away from an upcoming Rolex release by creating a new world record for the brand. To that end, Protopapas said he was directed to select a suitable watch from among the watches featured by Phillips in its printed auction catalogue, before acting as its clandestine buyer during the sale. He suggested that the rumour of the Ghost had been spread to give the illusion that Chinese demand for vintage Omegas was stronger than it really was (sales had been lagging in the country after the pandemic).
Omega was approached several times for this article. In response, the company said that it stood by the statement it made in June 2023 following NZZ’s reporting, and “dealt with the matter internally, therefore there is no intention to provide additional information”. Given the ongoing criminal investigation, it also said that it “cannot give any comment regarding the details or claims”.
Perez “felt vindicated” by the outcome of NZZ’s report. But the blight at Omega went deeper than the Speedmaster case. In December 2024 NZZ published a follow-up, revealing that initial searches of the suspects’ houses had uncovered numerous watches and watch components. This suggested that many more watches had been tampered with—and sold. Omega claimed that around 300 watches and watch components have been stolen from its warehouse and archives, with damages to the tune of SFr5.7m. (Protopapas told me that his residence was never searched and that he had “no other knowledge on this”.)
Perez suspected that this illicit activity was part of a wider plot to construct lucrative frankenwatches: “People were just using the archives like a self-service restaurant. They were just taking whatever they wanted.”
The Speedmaster affair exposed just how vulnerable the watch world is to skulduggery. But will we ever know how common frankenwatches are? Watch manufacturers and dealers want prices to stay high, and collectors may not want to look too closely at their purchases in case something is discovered that lowers their value. “It’s a pretty compelling reason to keep your mouth shut,” Perez said.
But the watch business is under strain anyway. Prices on the secondary market have fallen by more than a quarter since their peak in March 2022, according to ChronoPulse’s Watch Index, which tracks 140 models, though transaction volumes have remained about the same. That dropoff has been driven by uncertainty in the global economy, a broader slowdown in the luxury market and decreasing demand in China. In August the Trump administration added to the strain when it announced 39% tariffs on Switzerland, which ships a fifth of its watch exports to America; the following month such exports plunged by 55%. In November Swiss authorities talked Trump down to a 15% rate, helping to restore demand—but prices for many watches are still lower than they were. “You’re probably going to make a huge loss on anything you bought within the past five years,” said Hammerschmidt, the Hong Kong-based collector.
Many insiders see the falling prices as a necessary correction to the pandemic-induced bubble. Industry reform could help to stabilise the market in the future, but the ideas for it are just as murky as the norms around authentication. Yau, the authenticator and dealer in Hong Kong, thought that AI-powered systems could be trained to recognise the characteristics of authentic watches and use them to flag discrepancies, like Perez’s work but on a much wider scale. There’s no guarantee that this technology would work, however—or that, as is true today, this information will stop anyone from buying a fraudulent watch.
Perez would like to see a universal system that takes in the watches’ histories and “grades” them accordingly. In the meantime, he wants to continue shining light on the shady dealings in the watch world with his typical tenacity. “Sometimes you need to break things to repair them, or to build them up in a new way,” he told me.
In November 2024 I went to an International Watch and Jewellery Guild (IWJG) show in Miami, Florida, to see how dealers operate in the wild. The guild, which comprises 8,400 dealers from 77 countries, describes its monthly shows around America as “the world’s most active central exchange for acquiring, buying, selling and trading fine watches”, most of which are secondhand. The IWJG had been characterised to me by one regular attendee as “at the harder edge” of the industry—full of “intimidating” characters who make the most of the watch world’s lack of regulation to get deals done fast.
The show was held in a waterfront hotel whose lobby’s aesthetics were a curious mix of conference centre (grey suits, lanyards) and nightclub (purple lighting, thumping dance music). After battling through security, I stood in the corner of a cavernous, windowless hall, watching hundreds of buyers elbowing past their rivals, swarming round stalls and yelling bids. Several mobility scooters looked in danger of toppling their riders as they careered from seller to seller.
Rolexes, Cartiers and Audemars Piguets spilled across counters like fish in a market. The event looked less like a luxury convention than a treasure hunt for children on a sugar high
Behind the long aisles of sales counters, the men—for they were almost all men—overcame the logistical difficulties posed by their straining beer bellies to hurl watch-laden boxes onto trestle tables. Rolexes, Cartiers and Audemars Piguets spilled across counters like fish in a market (usually watches are handled like newborns, to remind you of their value). The event looked less like a luxury convention than a treasure hunt for children on a sugar high. Meanwhile, an actual child—a boy who looked to be about 12—sauntered through the stalls with the gravitas of Al Pacino, holding watches up to the light while a man I presumed to be his father or guardian nodded approvingly.
Business typically drew on decades of friendship, though bonds could still arise fairly quickly. Mike, a Lebanese-American dealer with a salesman’s charm and a watch you could benchpress, offered me a discount on a Cartier because I was, he said, the English doppelgänger of his Russian girlfriend. (He was 70, and, as he put it, “in good shape”.) He waved away my apology for not having enough cash and told me to pay him later before launching into stories about “a titty bar” and “one of the princesses in Saudi Arabia”.
It was immediately obvious why funny business might happen in a setting like this. Deals are done with a handshake or a nod, and payments are often only made after the show ends. “It’s very, very informal in that regard and it allows for a level of efficiency that you just don’t really see anywhere else,” Andrew Cohen, a Boston-based dealer, told me. “If you think of the lawyers, paperwork, contracts, expenses, just the amount of money it costs to close a deal of any other type. [Whereas] it’s just effortless here.”
But the swiftness of those deals made thorough inspections impossible; the most a customer could do to assess the worth of their chosen watch was to assess the character of the dealer. I overheard another attendee, a specialist in watch forgeries and thefts, ask a seller about a Rolex he had on show; the seller quickly pointed out that parts of it were fake. Such honesty is far from universal, however, and it was clear that relying solely on a “gentleman’s code” could leave sales vulnerable to bad actors.
At the same time, each dealer’s reputation acted as a sort of insurance—sketchy behaviour could hurt future business. “Hence why I buy from the people here, because I know if there’s an issue, they’re going to make it right,” said Rick, a kind-eyed dealer from Houston.
It seemed to me that the trading floor had accounted for the complexities of the secondhand-watch world—and human nature—better than the auction floor had. I asked Rick why he liked coming to the IWJG shows. “I would say it’s the relationships you have with the dealers...the trust factor,” he told me. “There’s a lot of morality that builds around this and in this business. That’s all you have: your word and your bond with each other.”
Emma Irving is a news editor at The Economist, based in Hong Kong |
