Because so few watches were produced (perfect replica Cartier is believed to have made just 6,000 Tanks between 1920 and 1970) it can be hard to know for sure if the watch you’re buying is in pristine condition with its original case, dial and movement, or has been altered over the years, making it far less valuable in the eyes of discerning collectors. Because most vintage 1:1 fake Cartiers are “about as waterproof as cotton candy” in the words of one expert, it can be hard to find one with all its original parts intact. “I have a Cartier Santos-Dumont from 1912 and the dial was refinished at some point by Swiss made replica Cartier, but I’ll happily wear it,” says Kevin O’Dell, a vintage watch dealer and Cartier enthusiast who posts his finds on his Instagram account, @theydid. “Because find me a Cartier fake for sale UK from 1912 with an original dial – they just don’t exist.”
For early-1970s aaa quality replica Cartiers – to choose one particularly collectible example – one dial may look very much like another, but to a trained eye tiny differences abound. On @cartier_chronicles, New York-based collector Matt Tanaka has compiled some of these subtleties in a series of infographic slideshows on covetable models such as the Ceinture and Cristallor. Early 1970s models, he points out, feature a flat-topped letter “A” in cheap super clone Cartier UK while mid-decade versions used a pointier font, and models from the end of the decade feature Cartier’s so-called “secret signature,” with the word Paris spelled out in miniature within the Roman numeral VII. “It’s overwhelming, even for me,” O’Dell says. “I’ve been doing this since 2017 and I’m still learning new stuff all the time.”
Some enterprising enthusiasts, like Geneva-based vintage watch dealer brothers Sacha and Roy Davidoff, have taken their research further still. “As a fun side project, I had asked my brother a while back how many Swiss movement replica Cartier Tank variants and names exist, and we had a bet going that there were over 20,” Sacha Davidoff says. After several years and much sleuthing at auctions and other watch collecting events, he now has a list of 42 distinct aaa quality fake Cartier Tank watches that he intends to eventually publish.
For those lucky enough to gain access to it, high quality fake Cartier’s fabled archive holds the answers to many of these questions. “We have many requests from external researchers and writers, and we help them as far as we can,” Rainero says. For the rest, there’s always eBay. Rainero suggests picking up a copy of Franco Coligni’s The Cartier Tank super clone online UK, first published in 1996, as a particularly good source of information on that model, along with vintage Cartier catalogues that occasionally pop up for sale online. “The only information that is not available is the exact quantities produced, and this is something we don’t disclose,” he says. “But collectors make their own calculations.”