Help Key: How to buy a watch?

The Chinese fake factories usually churn out familiar models and brands. Rolex and Breitling seem to be in the top positions while Panerai and IWC are inching up behind. Essentially, the pirates make popular watches that are easy to build - usually the three-handed models with only an hour, minute, and second hand to worry about. I’ve seen complicated watches like chronographs but usually the chrono mechanism doesn’t work and it’s junk.
Here’s something more insidious, however. If you’ve never seen a BR02 in real life, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between this:


and this:



Which one is real?
It’s almost impossible to tell and, if you were offered this one on eBay or even in a shop, the novice would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. The bottom is the real model. Here’s how to check on a watch before you buy it.
1. Know what you’re buying. Know the face, the case design, and the case markings. All of these are available from reputable dealers as well as the websites of the manufacturers themselves. In this case, we see that the date window is wrong and the hands are painted incorrectly. A quick comparison would let you pick this out immediately. MORE