Financial Times: Watch Register helps to beat the timepiece thieves
An extensive article and interview in the Financial Times Special Report: Watches and Jewellery covers the work of our The Watch Register team – published today!
…These thefts have highlighted the role of privately run services such as the Watch Register, the largest UK-based database that lists 70,000 stolen or missing watches with hundreds of new entries each month. The service was launched in 2014 as an offshoot of the Art Loss Register which began in the 1990s as a way to locate stolen works of art and reunite them with their owners.
Isobel Hallam of the Watch Register’s recoveries team says that it alone located 308 lost or stolen timepieces in 2020. In the seven months to the start of August 2021, 210 watches have been traced. The number of searches made on the register year-to-date is up by 9 per cent, too. Such crimes are not usually one-off robberies by opportunists. Watch lovers in many other countries have suffered as organised crime gangs see rich pickings in targeting well-to-do people who enjoy the luxury of wearing an expensive watch. The advice from police is to be aware of the value of your watch and to decide when and where to wear it…
Read the full article here.