Rolex Authentication

[skyboy86]

Hi guys, I try to have a local shop to authenticate the watch, they said they even can use the series number to identify if the watch is not stolen or lost . Is that true.

[Rolexken]

I believe only Rolex has that information.

[kkqd1337]

Re lost / stolen - I am not sure any one organisation has that information.

[watchmaker]

They’ll be checking against the Watch Register, which is an independent company utilised by police and insurers.

It’s not definitive, but these days if you report a watch stolen to the police they will inform them. So it’s fairly helpful.

[PenDelicate]

Originally Posted by watchmaker

They’ll be checking against the Watch Register, which is an independent company utilised by police and insurers.

It’s not definitive, but these days if you report a watch stolen to the police they will inform them. So it’s fairly helpful.

The police will inform the Watch Register? I presume this is just the UK police, but nevertheless: that's a fantastic service. (How did a private company secure such great cooperation?)

To the OP: this year, I bought a second-hand watch in Europe. The papers show it's from Thailand, early 2000s. It feels unlikely that if it were stolen from Thailand, exported to Europe and re-sold, that your local watch-shop would know much about it. Unless your local watch-shop is a secretive, state-of-the-art, multi-national, crime-fighting organization with near limitless resources and, no doubt, an army of suave, well-dressed, counter-espionage agents, trained in numerous martial arts schools and techniques.

I sent mine to a Rolex RSC, sharpish.

A Rolex RSC agent returned it to me.

In a briefcase.

At an undisclosed location.

[77T]

Simple logic, if some stolen Rolexes are reported to police (remember thieves who steal from thieves don’t tell), and some stolen ones are reported to Rolex (remember, not all victims know to do that), and relatively few stolen ones are reported to private registry owners (very, very few victims know about them - and few police departments know)…

Therefore?

Therefore, it is impossible that a stolen Rolex can be easily determined by a seller or buyer. But the RSC does have the only trusted database because anyone using a watch registry would surely also report it to Rolex.

The only time an unwitting buyer of a stolen pre-owned Rolex finds this out is when the RSC seizes it upon submission for service.


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[watchmaker]

I presume police in the UK do this because it’s in their interest, insofar as it absolves the police from any responsibility or work in maintaining any such lists themselves.

The watch register is a subsidiary of the art register which I believe has decades long reputation of working with law enforcement, auction houses and reputable dealers, thus when they branched out to watches they were already an established player.

It’s a global registry, but is for sure UK focussed.

[skyboy86]

Thank you for all your help. The local shop actually did a data base check and found that the watch was not stolen. But the data base seems to lack information, it didn't show when the watch was made or anything. So I think they are just using a watch register.

[Podmornica]

Bring the watch to your local AD that has the service department and tell them you want to perform the inspection of the watch. Ask them to run their Rolex database and see if someone reported it stlen .. That's the only way. Other would require you to send a watch for a full service ..

You can also type the serial numbers in google to see if someone reported it on various forums at some point