Where to start
If you are about to buy a specific watch, go straight to the brand tells: the fake Rolex Submariner walkthrough or the Royal Oak equivalent. If you are buying from a marketplace listing, read the Chrono24 verification checklist first and the eight seller questions second. If you are deciding whether an app is the right tool at all, the services comparison is the honest version, and WatchRadar vs Entrupy goes deeper on the single closest alternative.
The brand-by-brand reference material lives outside the blog, in the authentication guides — one page per maker, covering the specific tells the on-device model grades for Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, Omega, Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre.
Every post
- How to spot a fake Rolex Submariner — the 12 tells that always give it away — 2026-04-28
The longest piece on the site. Runs through cyclops magnification, rehaut engraving, datewheel typography, bezel pearl seating and bracelet end-links, in the order a counterfeit usually fails them. - How to spot a fake Audemars Piguet Royal Oak — 2026-04-25
Why tapisserie depth and bezel-screw rotation catch fakes that the silhouette does not, and how to light a Royal Oak dial so the pattern is actually measurable. - Buying a watch on Chrono24 — a step-by-step verification checklist — 2026-04-22
The photo set to request, the seller signals worth weighting, how escrow changes your exposure, and the point in the conversation where walking away is the correct move. - Watch authentication services compared: WatchRadar vs Entrupy vs Beckett vs in-person — 2026-04-19
What each option costs, what it can physically see, how long it takes, and which of them a serious buyer will actually accept as evidence. - What's actually inside a watch authenticity certificate? — 2026-04-16
Field by field: what a certificate records, what it deliberately does not claim, and why a verifiable identifier matters more than a printed seal. - Why a 5-angle scan beats a single photo for watch authentication — 2026-04-13
The technical argument for multi-angle capture: which tells are simply invisible in a single frame, and why parallax and raking light do most of the work. - Pre-purchase inspection: 8 questions to ask any watch seller — 2026-04-10
Eight questions, what a good answer sounds like, and what each evasive answer usually means. Useful whether or not you scan the watch. - Reseller's playbook: building a verification pipeline with iPhone-only tools — 2026-04-07
Turning intake, verification, certification and listing into a repeatable per-watch process that one person can run from a phone. - Inside the WatchRadar dossier: what the AI actually checks — 2026-04-04
A walk through each region the model scores, how confidence is assigned, and — the part most write-ups skip — what the dossier cannot see. - The economics of fake watches in 2026 — and why authentication is now table-stakes — 2026-04-01
Why counterfeit quality tracks the secondary-market premium, which references are therefore most attacked, and what that means for private-sale risk.
A note on what we will not publish
No post here guarantees that a watch is genuine, and none is a substitute for a watchmaker opening a caseback on a high-value purchase. Where a claim is brand-documented — a certification scheme, a warranty format change, a reference transition — it is stated as such; where it is a pattern we observe in scans, it is described that way. Counterfeit quality moves, so posts get corrected rather than quietly left to age.