How to keep your luxury watch safe with ‘Rolex Rippers’ rife - South China Morning Post

Those in Hong Kong who share a passion for luxury watches, heed this warning. In response to a feature on watch theft on Hodinkee, a US watch website, a reader left this comment: “Take them out of your safe before bed, admire them for a few moments, then put them back in the safe. In the morning, put on your Seiko.”

It took me back to a time when strolling down Temple Street meant being confronted at every corner by vendors with arms full of fake Rolexes, Cartiers and Patek Philippes. When challenged that these were fakes, the enthusiastic vendors would invariably reply: “Yes, but real Seiko inside.”

There has been a post-pandemic surge in the theft of luxury watches, according to The Watch Register, the world’s leading database for lost and stolen watches, noting that “watch crime has gone from a niche problem to front-page news”. Owners, said The Watch Register’s managing director Katya Hills, have become “afraid to wear their timepieces in public”.

Hong Kong, as a leading watch-trading centre and a home to thousands of wealthy collectors of luxury timepieces, has been in the thick of this. There are few other places where you would see shops selling safes in shopping malls.

According to Hong Kong police data, robberies in general jumped by 26 per cent last year, with burglaries up 52.8 per cent to 1,354, and snatchings up 26.6 per cent to 81. Seven watch shops and goldsmiths were robbed, up from three in 2022.

Celebrities worldwide have had their watches stolen, sometimes violently. In recent years, three of the world’s leading Formula One racing drivers – Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris – have had their Richard Mille watches, worth anywhere from US$180,000 to over US$300,000, snatched in public, and countless football celebrities have suffered similar indignities. Cyclist Mark Cavendish and boxer Amir Khan have been robbed of their luxury watches at knife or gunpoint.

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The appeal of super-luxury watches seems to have gone into overdrive since the late film star Paul Newman’s Rolex Cosmograph Daytona was sold at an auction in New York for nearly US$17.8 million in 2017. The Watch Register says the global market for luxury watches soared to US$79 billion in 2022 – with nearly 44 per cent of these pre-owned.

The attraction of luxury watches is not that so many low-lifes want to emulate their sporting heroes by wearing them, but that the watches are so easily traded. Social media, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency have made the illicit trade even easier.

Chris Marinello, CEO and founder of Art Recovery International, told Hodinkee that he once tracked a client’s US$300,000 Richard Mille watch, stolen in Milan, to an auction in Hong Kong just seven months later. In London, the rise of “Rolex Rippers”, a label that emerged after a spate of violent watch robberies in 2021 by a gang of six, has put people off wearing expensive watches in public.

Luxury watch theft is hardly new, however. According to Rebecca Struthers’ book, Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History, the crime was already rife in 1700s London. “The proliferation of watches was matched by a surge in pickpockets and street robbers,” she wrote. “Stolen watches were quickly and easily disseminated into London’s criminal underground through pawnbrokers and second-hand shops.”

Hong Kong customs officers escort two suspects from the Customs Marine Base in Stonecutters Island after a smuggling bust involving high-end goods including more than 400 luxury watches, in October 2022. Photo: Jelly Tse

The recent surge in watch theft has forced police across the world to respond. Paris police set up a dedicated task force in 2022. London’s Metropolitan Police followed suit, using undercover “victim” officers.

They have responded not only because stolen watches are so often, and so quickly, swept across international borders to key watch-trading hubs like Dubai and Hong Kong, but because investigations can take years. One Hongkonger who had her £5,000 (US$6,400) Rolex Cellini – a graduation gift from her father – stolen in the UK in 1994, was notified that her watch had turned up in a UK auction house in 2019, 25 years later.

The illegal watch trade is also complicated because it involves not just theft, but a huge counterfeit industry and even a brisk business in insurance scams in which watches are mysteriously “lost”. Over 40 million fake watches are sold worldwide every year, according to a Watchfinder report last year. “Five years ago, 80 per cent of fake watches were recognisable, while only 20 per cent required closer inspection,” it said. Today, “only 20 per cent are obvious fakes”.

Half of all counterfeit watches are ‘Rolex’– and spotting a fake is getting harder

While I know many in Hong Kong are alarmed, I must confess a certain indifference. I no longer bother with a watch, and have little at home worth stealing (burglars a decade ago walked away with nothing more than two cartons of Häagen-Dazs ice-cream).

I can’t help recalling one of my favourite films from 1999, The Thomas Crown Affair, an art-theft drama starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. As Russo, who plays an insurance investigator, said: “If some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some silly rich people, I don’t really give a damn.”

So too with millionaire sporting icons who need bling wrist furniture. My advice? Yes, keep your treasured watches in a safe and wear a Seiko but better still, don’t bother with a watch at all.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades

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