The fake watches get stolen. It’s a sad reality that every collector, enthusiast, or one-flashy-watch-owning, nightclub hopping bon vivant hopes never to encounter but a nice good fake watch is a tempting aim. Coming with the features of Small, easily purloined, and trivially easy to transport across international boundaries, these replica watches are among the most tempting of targets for criminals to steal and smuggle. 
One more thing, the stolen watch replicas get sold. No one steals a watch without hoping to profit from it, and there are any number of ways to turn a stolen watch into cash, many of which involve either misrepresenting ill-gotten gains to a third party, or (worse yet) colluding with a willing collaborator – what, in the colorful argot of the underworld, is called a “fence.” The issue of obtaining a stolen fake watch is understandable, but most are simply never found or returned to their rightful owners.
To solve this problem, the Watch Register was made naturally. The Watch Register is a database of lost and stolen wristwatches which was founded in 2016 by the Art Loss Register, which is the world’s biggest private database of lost, stolen, and looted artwork. The Art Loss Register was originally founded by owner Julian Radcliffe in 1990, and though it has attracted its share of controversy over the years, it has also been instrumental in recovering a vast number of artworks. Just this year, the Register has assisted in the recovery of a wide range of artworks – in January alone, six such artworks were recovered by the Register, including a 16th-century marble depicting St. John the Baptist, which had been stolen from a church in Naples in 1977. The Watch Register aims to provide the same service, but for watches. The Art Loss Register’s Katya Hills is now Managing Director for The Watch Register, and has overseen the placement into the Register’s database of over 60,000 timepieces since the founding – but also the recovery of many stolen timepieces. 
One early success was the recovery of a replica Patek world time wristwatch which had been stolen from its owner in Naples in 2014. According to The Watch Register, “… the watch belonged to a Swiss collector from whom it was stolen whilst he was holidaying in Naples in July 2014. The owner described the theft ‘like a scene from a movie.’ The watch was ripped off his arm as he walked through the town centre one evening and the thief ran off amidst clamouring passers-by.”
The fake watch finally ended up in New York, and was eventually recovered by its insurer from an auction. In another instance of The Watch Register at work, the firm assisted the London Metropolitan Police Flying Squad in identifying a stolen Rolex from a London dealer who, upon investigation, was found to have some fifty stolen watches in his possession; the fake Rolex in question – a gold GMT Master II – had been stolen during a smash-and-grab robbery in London’s Mayfair district, at Swiss Time Machine.
The Watch Register provides lots of services except the identification and recovery of stolen timepieces, and for auction houses and vintage or pre-owned watch dealers, the Watch Register can offer an additional layer of security, and verification that a watch offered for consignment or sale doesn’t come with a past.
The replica Watch Register Is an International Stolen Watch Database
