About Sminto

A free check of a watch serial number against the public record, and a record of the watch you can hand to the police and your insurer.

Who runs it

Sminto is a trading name of Netadot Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 12658462. Write to hello@sminto.com or use the contact form. Netadot Ltd is the data controller for anything the site stores about you; the privacy notice says what that is.

Why

The pages that answer "what year is my watch" today belong to dealers, and their tables disagree with each other by hundreds of thousands of serials. None of them says "we do not know", because a dealer page cannot afford to. This site can. It says whether the records are consistent, names the table behind every line, shows disagreements instead of resolving them, and says "not derivable" where that is the truth, which it is for every Rolex since spring 2010.

The record exists because a police report must list the serial before a registry will accept a loss, insurers ask for the serial and a photo, and about a quarter of owners have no record of their serial at all.

What is automated and what a person reviewed

The check itself is a program: it reads the serial against reviewed tables and writes the lines in fixed wording. The tables are drafted with the help of a language model from sources a reviewer queues, and nothing the model drafts reaches the site until a named person has opened the sources, accepted or corrected each row, and signed it with their name and the date. Rows the reviewer has not opened are never read by the build. The sources page lists the publishers and the reviewers; how it works describes the method.

Today the live tables hold 0 reviewed rows across 0 of 5 brands.

Corrections

If a row is wrong, say so through the contact form with the source you have. A correction becomes a draft and goes through the same review as every other row; it is never an edit made on the spot. The row's history stays in the repository.

Independence

Sminto is not affiliated with, endorsed by or an authorised service of any watch brand named on it, and not affiliated with Enquirus or The Watch Register, which it links to as a service. Brand names are used to refer to the brands' own watches. There is no advertising, no affiliate link, no payment and no partnership behind any line on the site.