archibald

Bill's calrified the US law in many other threads. What I can add is this: I recently saw (via a rep collecting pal who works on the Hill) some proposed legislation that would essentially make posession make all counterfeit goods a federal crime, subject to confiscation and a fine with possession of more than a few pieces triggering a prison term (to make enforcement against small time street dealers easier, I assume since you just catch them with a few crappy rolexes, whether they are tryng to sell them or no, and haul them in). My understanding is that it is unlikely to pass because it is contained in a bill that lots of US exporters and importers don't like for other reasons. Hilariously, the luxury goods industry tried to piggyback increased trademark protection onto various anti-terror bills w/o success, which is how the "Reps fund evildoers meme" started. My take is that if the industry spends enough money they'll be able to get something through, since "demand" deterrence is pretty popular whenever the suppliers of whatever we think we ought to deter are too powerful, useful, or amorphous to go after, e.g. our opium-growing warlord pals in Afghanistan and our national bankers, the Chinese.

Scammers rely on greed, and it looks like the winning bidder had some to spare. Please. Who is dumb enough to know what a panerai is and not know how much they're worth? Who would sell one for about what they could sell the movement for? Who would send $1500 to someone with 0 feedback?

I think they will fit snce the movement is the same. Of course the OP#'s and probably the missemillation will be wrong, but anyone who has those memorized will have already figured out your watch is a rep because of the dial, date font and mag, fit and finish, etc.

First of all, based on my (15+) transactions w/ eddie, including the 18k muller, there is no way in hell he's going to steal 1500 bucks from you. My guess is that he'll send another watch through. If you are in the EU, you should discuss with him the alternate method he sometimes uses. If you no longer want the watch, my guess is that you'll have to wait for his PP issues to be resolved. Either way, I'd be 100% sure you will get your money or a watch as soon as it can be done. BTW, $1450 is a great single unit price on the Muller, which is the most accurate rep made IMO.

Give 'em the money. You don't want to mess with a government agency which probably sees itself as a protector of one of your county's main industries (which is also why a 17 page report, probably for every rep, is done.) I bet they will send your name and address to Richemont's lawyers. It's is refreshing, though, to see a civilized country at work. The report is intended to prove the fakeness of the fiddy, a service and a warning to you. And they have to have the OP's permission to destroy it. In the US, some customs official would probably just take the watch home and you'd get a letter telling you you're supporting terrorists.

That I agree with. As far as fit and finish goes, I think you may be a little gen struck. I can't speak about accutrons, but I can say that I've owned reps that have equal fit and finish to gen Omega, Muller, and Rolexes I've worn and far beyond my old Hamilton. My Tag Monaco is a cool wach, but the fit and finish is kind of nice-replike, frankly. If you ever make it to a muller AD (my favorite brand, aesthetically) you'll be apalled at the poor fit and finish people who make 20k watches are capable of putting their first and last names on. You can't make blanket statements about gen finish, I don't think. IMO, the trick to buying gens is to find ones that are great relative values--then it really doesn't matter if yo spend $1000 or $10,000. Never will there be a gen Omega, PAM, or Rolex on my wrist--the craftsmanship is just not up to the prce tag. I have gen JLC Master Hometime and a Chopard LUC Pro Diver. The Chopard was probably overpriced even considering it's quality, but I guarantee nobody is ever going to ask if it's real. The JLC is as good a bargain as you can get in a luxury watch. Near Patek level of finish for a little over 4 grand.

Excellent! That's all I needed to hear. Wallets out, Bros...Let's get this done!

If I had to give up all but 4 of my reps, I'd keep: Dress: 18k Muller Casablanca Dress Casual: VC Overseas (The Overseas is sort of cheating since it fits the bill for dress, dress caz, and sport) Sport: PAM 051 Beater: I'd probably get rid of my dinged and dented PAM 047 and buy a Super Ocean or Steelfish. Vintage: MBW White SD

Lord knows I'd never tell Neil how to run his shop, but I do know if Maria would be ameneable to including the AP's and Pateks in the group buy, I'd send payment for the Patek and a white Sea Dweller immediately, "cash in an evelope" even, and judging by the number of people drooling over the ROO but balking @ the other dealers' prices, I'd bet that more than a few of those would be sold too. Anyone else wiling to buy 2 MBW's @ group buy prices?

My take is that MBW's look nly marginally better out of the box than their "standard" counterparts, but if you try to make a modded standard rep look as good as a modded MBW, you'll spend a good bit more than the original price difference since, as Pug pointed out, MBW's readily accept OEM parts. Are they worth it? V, imagine you could get OEM Panerai parts as easily as you can get OEM rolex parts. Now imagine one PAM rep costs $150 and won't take OEM parts, while a $350 PAM rep can takes OEM parts easily. Would you spend the extra $200? I know I would... Now that the MBW mystery has been cracked , I bet we'll see a small price drop if the numbers available rise as RWG travellers bring them back to sell, but not much. Unless the boss is paying the flight halfway around the world, it wold still cost most of us a couple grand to get a MBW even if we had real time GPS coordinates of that lady's big ol' butt.

Disclaimer: My blood pressure gets up when I get a 2mm scratch on any of my watches, and I think i'd have a heart attack if my watches got a scratch like some of the ones nanuq puts on his watches on purpose. I'd never ski with anything but a watch designated for destruction, which for me is a Poljot powered 163 or 47 or whatever its supposed to be. As far as the mechanics, that thing has survived repeated and sometimes intentional abuse and still keeps near COSC time. Looks like [censored] though.

Steve is dead on: 90% of the serious rep collectors I know spend 90% of their money and effort on mods and the super accurate reps. I also bet they purchase at leat one gen a year. But I think this is creating a niche market of excellent reps, parts projects, and talented watchsmiths , not driving the industry down hill. Keep in mind that a relativey small # of excellent reps can still be made and shipped under the radar as the mass produced crap gets "cracked down on" and confiscated. It's the canal street [censored], fantasy day-dates, and nobmariners that are going to dissapear first, if at all. And who really cares? It's the typical progression: You start out wanting a nice watch to wear to work or to hang out and you're not going to give Rolex 5 grand. You stumle accross one of the rep boards and check out all the watches for sale. Since you don't know a lot about watches, even the $100 day-date chronos look like amazing bargains, because you correctly assume that almost nobody you run into will know your watch is fake. But then you fall inot the trap...first you learn a little about how watches work whick excludes a lot of the low end models. Then you start looking at the side by side pics with flaws blown up at 15X. Soon a 3:00 marker .025mm too tick becomes a deal breaker. You know it will drive you crazy ever time you check the time. So you start buying only accurate models and having them modded. Modding becomes a fun game in and of itself. And you realize that most gens really are better watches than reps, and that a very few of them are even worth thier used price, so you buy those instead of ten average reps.

Wow. A lucky guy. 1990 Lefite. 1961 Mission Haute Brion. 1996 Cheval Blanc. For those of you thinking "Hmmmm...Gen PAM or 3 bottles of wine...Well, that's a no brainer!" a wine lover says, "Gimme a PAM rep and the wine." Can't rep a Lafite, although believe it or not, the Chinese try. (They'll rep the cork and the label and swap them out on a very good but much cheaper bottle of bordeaux and hope people won't know the difference, which the majority of "trophe wine" drinkers wouldn't). I think I remember that The Wine Spectator magazine estimated that 10% of all classic bottles of uncertain provenance sold at auction are "reps." BTW, how's the 97 l'Evangile drinking? 10 years ought to be enough for a '97, probably. I'm too much of a cheapskate to even look at most of those bottles, but I do have 1/2 a case of the l'Evangile, which was a fantastic bargain when it was released. $400 bucks a case, I think.

As far as the CC goes...count me out. It's a long story but someone managed to nab my CC through whatever protections PP uses and make a copy of it. Got a call from Visa that it was being used in the far east. Thing was this: since that card was a freebee froma club my wife joined w/ a low limit and shitty interest rate, she was going to rip it up, but since it had built in free protection, I decided to link it to the PP account I use for reps and rep parts only. Coincidence? Was the security breach somewhere else along the CC company chain? Maybe, but no more CC or PP with anyone I don't trust implicitly.

oops doubled down...

I'm no expert in shipping companies, but I bet their zeal for nabbing reps has something to do with the fact that they proably do a good bit of business with the companies whose items are being repped, either that or the US government put the fear of God into them before they let them do business w/ China. As far as italian customs, that is one messed up black hole of a place--I've sent 2 packages, exactly the same size to sssurfer. The first I paid $28 for EMS and it took almost two months. The second I shipped standard airmail and it got there much faster!

Wow, don't care to divulge your source do you?

Another vote for scrapping the letters E, T and A from any movement not made by ETA. Cuts it too close. On the other had I see no need to complicate things with trying to say which continent a genuine ETA movement is made on, since it shouldn't matter if we assume ETA has standardized QC. Also, members selling their watches in the offer section should have no problem adhering to the same format, especially since several models are being released in two versions--e.g. Asian 770and Swiss 7750; ETA w/ AR, etc and an Asia21J w/o AR, for example.

What's this guy talking about? "you can also spot that it´s a fake if you take a closer look at the gap between the bezel edge and the case edge, it´s too big... and the finish of the movement plates..." The movement fit and finish I get, but is he saying that the rep's bezel doesn't fit correctly or thatte case is too wide? Is this the 581 case problem everyone talks about...If so, I've never been able to see it w/ my eyes.

Apparently, like most reps, this one isn't quite 1:1... "Josh Says: August 31st, 2006 at 11:43 am I purchased one of these replicas and was very disappointed. I once owned one from the 70s and this one is no way close to the original. I am surprised the company who made them hasn’t done something about this. Those old ones were so well built, not something I can say about this one . . . . Sorry."

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years...3071jacob1.html

Snooty or not, it's a fact of life and I've come to believe its the #1 factor in plausibility several dozen times more important in the real world than date wheel fonts. We fix those thing for ourselves. It may be a sad commentary on our culture, but probably the single best mod you can make to make your gold daytona more believable is heading down to the outlet mall and picking up a Zegna suit and a pair of high end shoes.

Also, a while back, one of the watch magazines ran a piece that sort of bemoaned the markups watch companies enjoy on their gold watches and pointed out that gold was actually cheaper to maufacture than SS--for all we know Rolex saves the $150 in gold costs during their manufacturing process, making the gold markup pure profit.

I keep my crack pipe stowed away. But I wear my reps with pride. Dude, relax. When you really think about it, as a percentage of the population of the planet, very few people give a [censored] about you. Even fewer care about your watch. Of the very few who care about your watch. only a tiny fraction would ever be able to tell whether it's fake or not. I guess if you tell them it's fake, they'll have no choice but to believe you, but then again if you said "This is a Patek Sky Moon Tourbillon and can you believe I shelled out twenty three hundred [censored]ing dollars for it?" Most will say, "Wow, that's a lot of money for a watch." Only a tiny of fraction of those who care about your watch and can tell its fake will be Federal Customs Officials or of council to of Rolex, S.A. None of the Federal Customs officials who care about your watch and who can identify it as a replica can do a damn thing about it. The Rolex lawyer will undoubtedly demand you take it off, to which you should in turn demand that he "pucker up, sweetheart." Some folks around here (claim to) blurt out "IT's A FAKE!!!" every time someone tells them, "nice watch," but me I just say, "thanks" which seems to satisfy them (One person, though, in an AD, behind the counter, quite accusingly I might add, said "wow, I haven't seen one of those in a long time," which I took to mean "IT's A FAKE!!!" but I managed to escape without handcuffs) and even if it didn't it's not illegal in any way shape or form to own a rep. But don't take my word for it: The relevent Federal statutes are have been recently cited on this forum.

LOL! This is my all time favorite thread. Ever. SNL does Scorcese. Maria, I'll fix your DW overlay for a baht an hour... A couple bucks plus EMS...and worth every damn penny for entertainment value alone.