What a fake De Ville Trésor really is
The phrase covers any Omega De Ville Trésor that Omega did not make. Trésor is a real model name, first used in 1949 and brought back in 2014 as a thin dress watch. A fake De Ville Trésor copies that shape: roughly 40 mm across, about 10.6 mm thick in steel, domed dial, leaf hands, no rotating bezel. Sellers stack the copies into tiers, and the tier decides what shows up in the box. A $60 quartz version is a different object than a $400 automatic with a cloned movement. Both are copies. Only one tries to match the original on a bench.
Where replicas give themselves away
- Case thickness. The real steel Trésor sits near 10.6 mm. Budget copies run 13 mm and up because the movement inside is thicker than the genuine calibre.
- Dial height. The Trésor dial domes upward. A flat dial with printed indices is the first thing I look at.
- Logo. Applied metal on the real watch, printed and soft on most low-tier copies.
- Hands. Leaf shaped, faceted, polished at the edges. Stamped and dull on the cheap ones.
- Caseback. Sapphire on the genuine watch, showing the movement. Plenty of copies use solid steel or a sapphire with a crude printed rotor.
The movement question
Omega ships the Trésor with a Master Co-Axial calibre: in-house automatic, 72-hour reserve, silicon balance spring, 15,000-gauss magnetic resistance. No replica reproduces any of that. High-tier copies use a decorated Miyota or a Chinese clone that reads close through the caseback and behaves nothing like the original. Test the listing: a 28,800 vph movement sweeps, a quartz ticks. If the spec sheet says quartz, the price should say quartz too.
What to check before paying
Ask for a live video, not stock photos. Ask what movement is inside and where it came from. Check the crown: flat, signed, sitting flush with the case. If the model has a date, look at the window, since misaligned dates show up in photos. Compare the lug width against the stated spec, and read the return window before you send money. One more thing worth knowing: counterfeits are not a legal grey area in the US. Importing or selling goods that carry a registered trademark without permission breaks trademark law, and customs can seize a package. That risk lands on the buyer, not the seller.