Rob Corder reporting for WatchPro finds Rolex ADs reticent to fully embrace new Rolex Certified Pre-owned Program.

At the end of the day, retailers sending timepieces serviced by their in-house technicians to be certified by Rolex is an expensive theatric that will only catch the superficial issues Corder noted—like a new crystal, crown, or bracelet.

Rolex slowly cutting off the supply of spare parts to watchmakers for service over the past quarter century while simultaneously increasing the prices they charge for service led to a massive and very lucrative gap that Chinese, Italian, German, and American firms have come to fill. Even with an attentive eye, high magnification, and decades of experience working on the genuine article, it can be difficult to tell bona fide Rolex movement components apart from the more advanced facsimiles flooding the market without using an XRF spectrometer to fingerprint the molecular makeup of the specific alloys each component is composed of.