This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. It’s currently being manned by Jeremy Freed, watch writer extraordinaire, while Cam is on parental leave. Sign up here.
The watch was beautifully made, but for $5.5 million, it ought to have been. That was the good news. The bad news? It was a fake. This was the gist of a report delivered recently by Jose Perez—better known online as @perezcope—to a client about his latest purchase, a seven-figure vintage chronograph from a well-known Swiss brand. “He was shocked, of course,” says Perez. “He's a very wealthy individual, so $5.5 million is basically play money for him, but what hurt him was being scammed.”
Jose Perez is one of the world’s foremost experts in vintage watch authentication—and certainly the most infamous. A watch nerd of the highest order, Perez presides over a digital directory of more than 100,000 vintage timepieces, each cataloged down to its smallest details, which he uses to authenticate watches for would-be buyers and sellers. If you’ve heard of Perez, however, it’s probably because of his blog, Perezcope, where he publishes impressively detailed (and often strongly worded) investigative reports on timepieces at auction that he believes are either fake or misrepresented. It’s a pursuit that has made him a controversial figure in the watch world. While some see him as a crusader for truth and transparency, he has no shortage of critics, particularly among the auction houses and brands that have been the subject of his reportage.
The problem of counterfeit watches has been around since the 1700s, when (in an ironic reversal), Swiss watches were altered to be passed off as then-superior English-made ones. The grift has remained basically the same ever since: Dress up a cheaper watch to look like a more expensive one, sell it to an unsuspecting rube, and pocket the profits. As vintage watch collecting grows in popularity, however, and the number of high-value pieces changing hands via auctions and private sales increases, so too does the potential payoff for high-end fakes.
“Fake watches have become significantly harder to spot and to define,” says Quaid Walker, founder of the online watch marketplace Bezel. “What used to be obvious knockoffs have evolved into highly sophisticated ‘superfakes’ that replicate case materials, dials, movements, and accessories.” According to Counterfeiting, Piracy and the Swiss Economy 2025, a report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, $1.88 billion worth of counterfeit Swiss-branded watches was sold in 2021 alone. At Bezel, which authenticates all of the watches sold on its platform, 34% of the watches examined in 2025 were rejected, up from 29% the previous year.
While many forgers focus on mass-producing contemporary watches from major brands, the $5.5 million fake Perez discovered isn’t the only one of its kind. That watch, Perez believes, originated at a workshop that specializes in high-end restoration—one of very few places that have both the access to rare and valuable watches and the expertise to copy them in such extraordinary detail. “The level of craftsmanship is remarkable,” he says. “When I first saw the serial number engravings, I would have called the watch real. That's the level we're dealing with now.”
Despite his reputation for stirring up trouble at auction houses, Perez believes in the greater good of his work. “My goal is really to make the market better and safer for collectors,” he says. “Vintage watches have become something totally anachronistic—nobody needs them to tell time anymore—they've become an art form. But the market has always been plagued by fear of fakes and over-restored pieces, and that hesitation holds back values and confidence.”
While all-out fakes are a serious problem, a larger issue is the so-called “Frankenwatches” that combine original parts with counterfeit ones. “We rarely see watches that attempt to replicate a real watch with 100% fake components,” says Walker. “The inclusion of genuine components is enough to pass a cursory inspection, so many of these watches exchange hands multiple times before being caught.”
Then there’s the question of restoration. Because authenticity is everything in the world of high-end vintage watches, the difference between a rare piece with all of its original parts intact and one with non-original components can mean millions of dollars. Because of the higher prices fetched by unrestored vintage watches and the challenges of proving their provenance, unscrupulous sellers can maximize their profits by presenting a restored watch as all-original. “It’s something I care about deeply,” says Perez. “For 30 years, auctioneers and dealers have told collectors that restored watches are worthless. And at the same time, those same people have been selling restored watches without disclosing the restoration. It's completely hypocritical.”
Perez believes restoration is an unavoidable reality for most vintage watches, and the bias against restoration disproportionately benefits auction houses and sellers. “A 50- or 60-year-old watch in perfect condition has almost certainly been restored—that’s just physics. Materials age. Patina develops,” he says. “The people doing this restoration work are genuinely skilled artisans—in some cases, artists. But they work in secret because the moment a restoration is known, the watch loses value. I want to change that.”
The heart of the issue is the collecting world’s obsession with originality. Because there are so many fakes floating around, an untouched watch is treated as self-validating evidence: An oxidized “tropical” dial, the thinking goes, is harder to fake than a pristine one. If a watch shows evidence of being worn and exposed to air and humidity over decades, it’s not only less likely to have been tampered with, it’s also aesthetically unique, another factor that drives up the price. As a result, genuinely untouched vintage watches are rarer, and inherently more valuable. In the art world—where pieces can be centuries old, and restoration can be a necessity—restorers are credited for their work. Why, Perez and his acolytes ask, should the watch world be any different?
It’s a divisive issue, and one that’s likely to provoke hot takes from the most mild-mannered of enthusiasts. “For me, restoration is overdone in the world of vintage watches,” says Eric Wind, owner of Wind Vintage. “Too many people, frequently dealers, are having their watches recut to make them look like what they envision 'new old stock' versions of these watches to have looked like.” While Wind agrees that the relative scarcity of watches in excellent original condition encourages deception, he remains a diehard member of team patina and believes restoration only makes sense if a watch is so far gone that it’s no longer functionally wearable.
One way Perez is advancing his agenda is by offering his services to buyers and sellers who want to verify the provenance of their watches. “When someone has a watch they’re unsure about, I do a detailed report,” he says. Clients can choose from several tiers of authentication, ranging from a basic assessment of the movement, case back stamps, and engravings to a “passport” complete with high-res photographs of the disassembled watch and detailed descriptions of each part. “If the owner wants to sell, they can include it with the watch so the buyer has certainty.”
The response to his work has been mixed, to say the least, but according to Perez, the needle is starting to move. “I think auction houses have generally become more careful,” he says. “They research the watches better than before, and in some cases, they just reach out to me if they are not sure. But there are also some collectors who think I’m a bad guy, that I'm just trying to destroy the market.”
It remains a contentious topic, but as the prices of vintage watches continue to rise, the most valuable pieces increasingly resemble blue-chip artworks rather than wearable timepieces, and the stakes for buyers, sellers, and counterfeiters alike have never been higher. “Today I checked a Rolex Daytona Paul Newman dial for a famous dealer,” Perez says. “The dial is fake, identified by the tiniest graphical errors in the original, which the counterfeiters haven’t figured out yet. The print quality is insane, though.”