# These “tells” that give away knockoff merchandise

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/these-tells-that-give-away-knockoff-merchandise/1014850>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 26, 2025, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/these-tells-that-give-away-knockoff-merchandise/1014850 "2025-02-26T23:55:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 21

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**Author:** ![Pork\_Rind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pork_rind/32/111_2.png) [@Pork\_Rind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pork_Rind)\
**Post date:** [February 27, 2025, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/these-tells-that-give-away-knockoff-merchandise/1014850/21 "2025-02-27T04:49:36Z")

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> [@mixdenny](#):
>
> The company will put you on a list and when they have one available you get a call to come down and inspect it.

When they have one _and want to sell it to you_. If you ask for a GMT Master II or a Daytona in stainless steel, they may say they’ve put you on the list, but unless you have a “spend history” with that dealer, your name won’t come up to the top of the list for a few years **if ever**. At the peak of the Rolex craze just post-covid, the stores would have exactly zero watches for sale for any customer other than their short list of high rollers.

Now that the Swiss watch market is deep into a correction, there are watches in the store, but a new buyer will get a lot of pressure to buy ‘undesirable’ models; small sizes, odd two-tone colors, weird dials.

Anyway back a little closer to the topic, the ticking thing was a tell because real Rolex watches have mechanical movements that, like most Swiss watches, tick at 4 hertz, or ticks per second. At a casual glance, that looks like a smooth sweep, but you really look carefully, you can see it starting and stopping. It’s actually hard to make a mechanical watch tick once per second. they call that ‘dead beat seconds’ and that’s a function found only on very expensive watches with especially esoteric movements.

So in the old days, a fake Rolex had a ticking second hand because the counterfeiters would just stick a cheap quartz movement in the case. In exactly the opposite story, where it’s hard to make a mechanical watch tick, it’s hard to make a quartz watch sweep, and at the counterfeit price point, no one would bother.

As folks have already pointed out in this thread, the gap between the best fakes and the real thing is getting vanishingly thin. The real nerds have a list of tells they don’t like to share, as the moment a particular telltale becomes public, the factory in China fixes it. The “reptime” folks on Reddit track these revision with numbers much like software updates because they make these changes several times per year.

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