Well, you either buy "art" to appreciate it, to transfer value into an asset, or to show off. Can be all of the above. You're saying this guy just wants to show off. Shame to use watches for such. They're a marvel of form and function.

This is reportedly quite common. Supposedly (but I have doubts), there's a similar market for cellphones with fake specs -- the consumers know the specs are fake, but they need the fake exterior to impress their business partners.

> cellphones with fake specs

but, don't you just need to show off any old cellphone, and then say something like 'this baby has twenty-three ARM IXXIX cores, running at one hundred point six gigahertz, with forty terabytes and a double AMDXOLCiD display!' to fake the specs?

The business guys who are into watches tend to have a good look at each others, talk watch collecting for a while, and can usually tell fakes.

The business guys who are into watches tend to buy fakes that can fool people like them.

FTFY

I've had exactly that conversation with a few. You'd be surprised how many are serious collectors who invest in watches. That doesn't work with fakes. That whole Rolex culture is also a deliberate part of how they sniff out fake people. The examples in the article were terrible, I'm not a watch guy and could spot them a mile off. I can usually tell with bags, wallets, shoes. Very few fakes don't have clear tells if you know the originals, I sometimes wonder if it's deliberate.

If they're poor fakes, yes. But if they're like the ones mentioned in this article, there would be no way of telling without bringing a microscope with you.