This is not just limited to watches, of course. I'm an avid collector of headphones. One of my favorite legendary headphones is the Sony MDR V6 [1]. I made about 3 purchases before I could get my hands on a real one. Even some popular retailers sell fakes unknowingly. The fakes are so good that most of the time you wouldn't even know [2]. And they only keep improving.

There was once I spotted a fake in a Sony showroom in Asia and even they were blown away when I pointed out the differences. Thankfully, they took it off the shelf.

It's a really, really a sad thing in the collector's world.

China of course, is where most fakes are made, and you'd be surprised how many fakes are out there on Alibaba, despite Jack Ma claiming otherwise. This is their bread and butter. With all that said, I think it's perhaps a cultural issue, as everything they possess is a clone of something:

Baidu = Google

Weibo = Twitter

Youtube = Youku

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Even their high speed rails were a brutal rip off of the Japanese trains [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_MDR-V6

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiGoyNbVDvI

[3] http://fortune.com/2013/04/15/did-china-steal-japans-high-sp...