Luxury watch thefts on the rise – but £1m of them were recovered last year by a team of specialist hunters, including this £21k Rolex…

The number of luxury watches stolen or missing has risen 60 per cent in the past year – but many owners, including famous footballers, have been reunited with their beloved timepieces with the help of experts at The Watch Register.

The Watch Register is an international database of timepieces, and lets buyers and sellers register and check the history of a watch, including if it has been stolen.

The latest figures from the Register show that there were 6,815 watches newly recorded as being missing or stolen in 2022, a 60 per cent rise from 2021. There are now 80,000 missing watches recorded with the Register.

A rise in watch thefts has also led to many insurers refusing to cover luxury watches, and others scaling back cover. 

Return to sender: One of the watches recovered by The Watch Register was this Rolex Daytona, worth £21,000, which was stolen in a burglary in Kent

But The Watch Register also helps track down and reunite owners with their missing valuables.

Last year the Register tracked down more than 600 watches, with a total value of more than £1million.

Individuals, insurers and traders such as jewellers and auction houses can access the Register to try to locate stolen timepieces, or to check the history of a certain watch.

One of The Watch Register’s more famous clients was Premier League footballer Rico Henry, whose £30,000 Rolex GMT-Master II mysteriously went missing from his pocket as he was staying in a London hotel on 19 March 2023.

Henry then listed his watch with the Register, which discovered the piece had been taken to a pawnbroker.

The pawnbroker then checked the Register, and discovered the watch really belonged to Henry. 

The honest pawnbroker flagged this up to the Register, who went to get the watch back – and then returned it to Henry.

Sometimes the Register tracks down watches several years after they are stolen, with the luxury items often travelling through several countries before they are recovered.

In one example, a £35,000 Patek Philippe was stolen by robbers armed with swords from a Bournemouth jewellers in 2019. 

The watch eventually resurfaced three years later in the US, having been bought in good faith from a seller in Dubai – a total journey of more than 11,000 miles.

In another case, an investigation by The Watch Register led to a London watch fence being caught with a stolen Rolex Eye Of The Tiger watch, the rarest modern Rolex produced and worth more than £150,000. 

The man claimed to have bought the incredibly valuable watch in a branch of Costa Coffee.

Upon being questioned, the man then produced another couple of dozen expensive watches from a plastic carrier bag, claiming to be a watch enthusiast – but in reality he was a well-known fence. The police later found another 60 stolen watches in the man’s house.

How The Watch Register works

Adding a watch to the database costs £15 per timepiece.

Searching the Register for the history of a watch costs £10 for a one-off search, or as little as £1.77 if carrying out multiple checks.

If a registered watch is stolen or goes missing, The Watch Register is usually notified when a trader runs a check on the watch against the Register’s database.

The Register then responds, normally within five minutes, to let the trader know if the item is stolen or lost, or if it is clean.

The customer, who may be a criminal or acting in good faith, will already have given the trader their contact details.

If the watch is stolen, the trader normally holds onto it unless it is dangerous to do so. The Register then reclaims the watch and/or allows the original owner or insurer of the item to do so.

If the owner or insurer picks up the watch themselves, there is a fee of 5 per cent of the benefit to the owner, based on the market value of the watch when it is recovered.

Street smarts: Although it is not ideal, watch experts recommend keeping valuable watches hidden from view in public, especially in high-risk areas

If the owner or insurer choose to have The Watch Register’s specialist team recover the watch, the fee is 20 per cent of the net benefit.

However, a large number of watches reported as stolen never really are – but the real owner is trying to commit insurance fraud.

The Watch Register managing director Katya Hills said a ‘bare minimum’ of 10 per cent of the cases reported to it by insurers are where they suspect insurance fraud, rising to as much as 50 per cent for some insurers.

The types of fraud seen by the Register include people making multiple claims for the same watch with different insurers, or wrongly claiming a watch has been stolen.

‘One man said he had lost a Rolex while diving in the sea, but two months later we found them offering that watch for sale at a pawnbrokers’, Hills told This is Money.

‘Many are claiming ownership of a watch on the basis of paperwork they have bought online, either fake or genuine papers. 

‘We also see fake watches, or Frankenwatches, used to make insurance claims, as well as people exaggerating the value of watches.’

How to keep your watch safe

Hills, of The Watch Register, said that insuring and registering a watch are crucial.

‘A third of owners we interviewed had no specific insurance for their watch,’ Hills said, ‘while a quarter that had cover found it only covered them at home.’

When insuring a watch, it is therefore important to make sure the item is insured as an individual valuable, for the right amount and for the locations you need it to be covered in.

Take reasonable care when in high-risk areas, such as outside hotels, clubs, bars and in tourist hotspots where thieves congregate, Hills added.

If you are unlucky enough to have a watch stolen, reporting it to the Register quickly is crucial.

‘The reason being the watch is sold on, usually, within hours of the theft, so the best chance of making a recovery is to contact us ASAP’, Hills said.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk