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What do Rick Ross, Future, Soulja Boy, and Sean Kingston all have in common? If you answered, ‘They’re all famous and successful rappers’, you’d be right. But you’d also be right if you’d said that everyone one of them, despite all their success, has been caught out by the FakeWatchBusta.
Even with millions in the bank, Soulja Boy’s Audemars Piguet — widely considered to be the makers of the world’s finest timepieces — watch is a “bad… quartz fake” with a dead battery, “so it shows the same time in all his pictures… it’s 10:25 all day, every day,” the FakeWatchBusta tells Noisey.
The European watch enthusiast, who keeps his real name a secret since, according to him, “the threat of lawsuits are starting to pile up from the jewellers selling these fake watches,” initially started his project calling out regular Instagrammers for “fronting like [they] bought a Rolex Submariner,” but he now regularly catches out wealthy celebrities like Jadakiss and basketballer Carmelo Anthony.
“I think the jewellers are taking advantage,” he says. “But if [rappers] wanted the real deal from Ben Baller it would be twice the price. I don’t think they care about the watch part – it’s the diamonds and shit that’s important to them. I think it’s more jewellery than watches for most of them.”
However, this horological vigilante says that there are plenty of rappers out there who wouldn’t dare let impostor timepieces touch their wrists. “Meek Mill is genuine, 50 Cent is genuine, Eminem got one Rolex, and it’s real. Jay-Z is the one with the nicest watches,” explains FakeWatchBusta.
And this isn’t all just about embarrassing a bunch of rap stars. According to FakeWatchBusta, the manufacturing of fake watches involves “terrible conditions, use of hazardous materials and child labor… At the prices they sell this for it’s not possible to [make these watches] in an ethical way.”
