Simulating sophistication

The term “genuine replica,” a favored parlance of counterfeit luxury watchmakers and their advertisers, seems oxymoronic, if not cynical, at first. After all, touting your watch as a “genuine fake” is akin to bragging about a high ‘F’ on an exam — congratulations, you still failed. But it does highlight a disturbing new trend in the counterfeit watch industry: the appearance of a ‘second-tier’ of better crafted, better mechanized replicas that sometimes fool even the experts themselves. Good times for bad business While luxury watch makers wilted beneath the heat of the global financial crisis, enduring their worst period since Japanese quartz watches flooded the market in the 1970s, business for their cut-price counterparts boomed. A 2009 report by the group Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), in conjunction with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), estimated that the global market for all counterfeit goods was worth upwards