Tudor guide · 5 min read
How to spot a fake Tudor
Modern counterfeits are good enough to fool casual buyers — and almost never good enough to fool a professional with the watch in hand. These are the checks dealers run on a Tudor, useful whether you're vetting a purchase or wondering about a watch you already own.
Why Tudor gets faked
Tudor's rise made it worth faking, and vintage pieces attract a different fraud: frankens assembled from mixed genuine and aftermarket parts. Era-consistency is the core check on old Tudors; movement inspection settles modern ones.
Tudor tells the professionals check
- Know the era logos: the Tudor rose belongs to early watches, the shield from the mid-1960s onward — wrong logo for the reference is a red flag.
- Vintage Tudor Submariners use Rolex-signed crowns, case backs and bracelets; their absence (or wrong-era presence) betrays frankens.
- Modern in-house calibres are marked MT56xx and visible to any watchmaker — clones don't match.
- Snowflake hands have a precise angular geometry; reproduction hands are subtly wrong in proportion.
- Serial and reference numbers between the lugs should match known ranges for the model's era.
The seller's trap
There's a scam aimed at sellers too: the buyer who declares your genuine watch 'probably fake' to slash their offer, counting on your uncertainty. The defence is competition — when multiple registered dealers inspect the same listing, no one can talk the watch down unilaterally. If it's genuine, the other bids will say so.
Not sure about yours?
Submit it anyway — it costs nothing. Registered dealers assess the photos, and if they want your Tudor, their bids answer the authenticity question in the most concrete way possible: with money. And if it turns out to be a replica, you've lost nothing and you know the truth.
Ready to sell your Tudor?
Submit your watch free. Registered dealers bid, you take the best or walk away.