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Nothing worse buying a rep that was sold as a gen, however there is sweet icing on the cake!

13stepper

You're Saying I Can Sell?
10/3/19
59
25
18
A couple weeks ago i picked up a BNIB Tag Heuer Aquaracer Calibre 5 ceramic bezel. i paid a fair secondary market price. No warranty but I purchased it from a highly reputable seller on another forum. To be clear, it wasn't a to good to be true deal. I truly was buying a gen Tag.

The moment it arrived, excitedly i opened the box and quickly inspected the watch. The pip on the bezel stood out to me as "odd". I've owned a few gen Aquaracers in my time, i enjoy them as a summer beater.

Without having a gen to immediately compare it to, everything, except the pip, looked perfect on it. It wound nice and smooth, the crown pulled accurately and set the date and time smoothly with nice clicks on the date wheel. I tell you guys, this thing was REAL lol. Scary good.

but the pip bothered me. So later on that evening as i prepared to watch a game, i pulled out my laptop and started comparing to photos of the gen version, specifically Ii went to the Tag Heuer site first, then visited Chrono24, watchrecon etc. And the pip was off! The pip on the rep appeared to be glued on, not embedded in the bezel within the triangle like the gen.

I then ran the serial number on the Tag Heuer website, sadly the serial number was not recognized.

Finally, I went to pure time to look at the rep version of this watch, my suspicions were confirmed. The other dead giveaway was the serial number. The serial # of the "genuine" rep is RHR3335 and the serial number of the piece featured on puretime is RHR3338. There was no way, the odds of my serial number being only 1 digit different from the rep that this watch was gen.

The next day, i headed to my local AD to confirm my suspicions, as if the proof that i had already seen wasn't enough. Once i had a gen in hand, it all fell apart.

The seller, which i wholeheartedly believe did not knowingly sell me a rep as a gen, could not believe it either. I was immediately refunded and provided a return label.

Upon further investigation since then my friend and I uncovered an epidemic of these rep's being sold and represented as genuine on Kijij and Ebay all over Canada. Very sad.

Here is the icing on the cake.

If it wasn't for RWI and the plethora of data I would never have even considered this watch to be a rep. The seller literally moves millions of dollars of watches a year, I ALWAYS BUY THE SELLER.

I joined this form not long ago, i currently have a rep on order through a TD and i've read a ton of information here.

Thank you RWI for everything you do. I am throughly enjoying this experience, i purposely came here to learn about the rep industry so that i don't get burned and you literally saved me and most importantly my dollars!

I have since purchased a genuine Tag from my AD lol.
 

Bones2U

Known Member
27/11/18
194
65
0
Toronto
Well you could always buy the rep version at a fraction of the cost since it looked so good and keep both.....

Where in Canada are you from? I’m in Toronto


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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applestooranges

Known Member
18/7/18
145
83
28
Man, that's a shame. I won't be surprised if at some point, the reps kill the online grey market entirely. The members on here try to call out eBay scams when they can, but there isn't much they can do, especially when we start looking at vintage or frankened pieces. Most of the time when we start reporting, a given item would already have quite a number of bids on them.

In my neck of the woods, reps have been sold to second hand dealers that are aware of, and are trying their best to detect reps. The factories can even do randomised serial numbers now.

Hey at least you'll never be burned again.
 

Wrestleantares

Known Member
19/9/18
135
48
28
I've caught reps being passed off as gens twice in the last few months simply from the knowledge gained from this group.