Around £1.5 billion, and counting. That’s currently the staggering total worth of luxury watches stolen or lost, according to the global Watch Register database.

With a 236% increase in the number of watches with unique serial numbers added to its global listing over the last 12 months, the watch crime prevention database is calling for increased collaboration from all stakeholders “to tackle the escalation in luxury watch crime” and to “disrupt the global trade in stolen watches”.

It stressed that the issue of watch crime “is a growing public concern which is impacting consumer confidence”.

It wants insurers, auction houses, watch dealers, manufacturers and law enforcement agencies to support a centralised global database for the registration of lost and stolen timepieces. 

The call comes as the Watch Register highlights “the proliferation of fragmented watch registration database services, which cause confusion and dilute data archives, reducing the chances of returning a match for a watch that has been lost or stolen”.

Katya Hills, Managing Director at The Watch Register, said: “A crowded and fragmented market with multiple registration sites is unhelpful. It significantly increases the chances of a stolen watch not being picked up, as a trader may search a different database to the one on which a stolen watch was registered. It also causes confusion amongst traders over which platform to use, which can make them reluctant to use any database at all. These are just some of the challenges highlighted in our report, which recommends industry-wide support for one international searchable database that reduces the liquidity of a stolen watch.”  

Hills pointed to its parent company the Art Loss Register and its 30 years’ experience in protecting the trade and improving standards in the art world. “We know how important it is to provide the market with a single due diligence database that is recognised industry-wide across the globe to identify lost or stolen works of art. 

“Alongside the sophisticated search algorithms of our global database that help with the practical identification of a watch serial number, we employ an experienced investigative team who has the necessary cross-border negotiation skills to reunite a watch with its legal owner once a match has been made.” 

The Watch Register “actively searches for lost and stolen watches on the global pre-owned market until they are recovered, with its database used by watch dealers, jewellers, pawnbrokers and auction houses “to identify stolen watches prior to transactions”.  

It operates a specialist recoveries team to secure the lost/stolen watch and remove it from circulation, claiming it finds four lost and stolen watches a day, on average. Fifty per cent of watches it finds are located within a year of the theft and 35% within six months, it noted.