On December 5, 2025, Sotheby’s will conduct a series of auctions in Abu Dhabi, UAE, including the Prestigious Jewels & Watches from an Important Private Collection. One of the highlights is a Rolex Oyster Cosmograph Daytona Ref. 6263 with a rare all-silver, monochromatic ‘Albino’ dial, which could go for big money. Collectors striving for this trophy piece will be interested to learn that the ‘Albino’ is not a factory original Rolex model. These are watches created in the past 30 years with what are believed to be Ref. 6238 Pre-Daytona service dials found in corresponding timepieces from South America. Essentially, they are Frankenstein watches. Published in a book titled Fero – 150 Steel Chronographs, the present watch is new to the auction market. It is one of three known pieces and is almost identical to the first ‘Albino’ to appear on the market, which once famously belonged to guitarist, singer, and songwriter Eric Clapton and was sold by him at Christie’s New York in June 2003 for USD 50,190. In May 2015, Clapton’s ex-watch sold for USD 1.42 million at Phillips. The moniker ‘Albino’ was coined by legendary British watch dealer Tom Bolt, aka Watch Guru, who, while working closely with me on the Rolex Sea-Dweller Chronicles during the pandemic lockdowns, came forward with the most interesting piece of information about the birth of the very first ‘Albino’ Daytona.

---

Update December 8, 2025
The ‘Albino’ sold for USD 952,500 incl. premium. The hammer price was USD 750,000. The watch was purchased by watch dealer Kamal Choraria, who is mentioned in the update below from December 4, 2025. Right after the sale, Kamal posted on Instagram that a 4 million dollar watch was sold for just under one million because of all the drama involved, obviously hinting at this article. Funnily enough, he had contributed to the drama himself by reposting my article on his Instagram account before the auction, basically agreeing with me on everything, and secretly hoping that it would scare away potential bidders. Now that he got the watch for a relatively small amount of money—he told me via text that he was prepared to bid up to 3.5 million—Kamal is no longer claiming that the ‘Albino’ dials were Ref. 6238 service dials but that they were meant for Ref. 6263 all along, as part of a Rolex project that was shelved. What we are witnessing here is a clear case of double-dealing. Kamal, who is merely a middleman for collectors, probably told his client that he would badmouth the watch to get it cheap by claiming that the ‘Albino’ dial was a 6238 service dial. Now he is trying to change the narrative back to the status quo and appease his collector.
Click here to read the full update.

Update December 4, 2025
Kamal Choraria, a British watch dealer, has come forward with explosive new information regarding the present ‘Albino’ offered at Sotheby’s in Abu Dhabi. This ‘Albino’ dial was also found in a Ref. 6238 ‘Pre-Daytona’, which Kamal and his partner purchased from the original Italian owner around 2012. The owner recounted at the time that he had sent his Ref. 6238 ‘Pre-Daytona’ with a damaged silver dial to Rolex for service, and it came back with the ‘Albino’ dial. Kamal is sure that the ‘Albino’ dials were service parts for Ref. 6238 ‘Pre-Daytonas’: “The so-called ‘Albino’ dial wasn’t originally designed for the Daytona ref. 6263 at all. It was actually a service dial intended for the Rolex Chronograph ref. 6238, often referred to as the ‘Pre-Daytona’.” Kamal and his partner later sold the dial separately to a famous Roman watch dealer, who in turn installed it in the present Daytona Ref. 6263 and sold it to a famous Italian collector. 

Birth of The ‘Albino’ Daytona Ref. 6263

Having forged a friendship with Tom Bolt, aka Watch Guru (IG: @watchguru_), one day, while working on a research project for him, Eric Clapton’s famous ‘Albino’ Daytona came up in our conversation. Tom, who has been in the business for more than 30 years, told me he had owned the watch in the late 1990s and that the moniker ‘Albino’ was his invention, as were many other famous nicknames, by the way, like John Player Special (JPS), Great White (1655), The Beast (AP RO Offshore) and The Cobra (AP) to name a few. Of course the topic of appreciation came up as well. The watch went from USD 50,190 when Clapton sold it at Christie’s in 2003, to a whopping 10x or USD 505,000 at Sotheby’s in 2008. In 2015, it sold at Phillips for CHF 1,325,000 (USD 1.42M).

Our animated conversation suddenly quieted down a tad as Tom seemed preoccupied with something. What is it, Tom? I asked. Not wanting to lie to me, Tom spilled the most unbelievable tin of beans.

Today, Tom is championing a board that defines new standards for watch collecting, realizing that for watches to reach the prices of art and/or classic cars, the business has to be cleaned up. He even said as much in a recent article he wrote for The Telegraph, in which he called out Rolex itself for its total ineptitude regarding its Atelier de Restauration accepting fakes for restoration. I uncovered this issue just recently. While it is unbelievable that Rolex would make such mistakes, it is only the tip of the iceberg. Not wanting to have double standards, Tom has now agreed for me to publish the truth about these ‘Albino’ Daytonas.

Let’s cut straight to the chase. Ref. 6263 ‘Albino’ Daytonas are NOT factory original Rolex watches. Essentially, they are Frankenstein watches. Eric Clapton’s ‘Albino’, the first example to appear on the market, was a creation of Tom Bolt. The all-silver, monochromatic dial came from a Rolex Pre-Daytona Ref. 6238 with a missing bezel, which Tom had acquired in the late 1990s from a South American lady. Since the dial was marked ‘Rolex Oyster Cosmograph’ and lacked the typical 6238 tachymeter, Tom naturally assumed the watch must have had a Daytona tachymeter bezel. Featuring the magic word ‘Oyster’, it made sense to him that the dial would be best suited for a screw-down pusher Daytona.

So Tom chose a random Ref. 6263 with case number 2874334 he had in stock, and sent both watches to his watchmaker for the dial transplant. When the newly created ‘Albino’ came back, Tom noticed that his watchmaker had also transferred the blued 6238 hands. He was told that the Ref. 6263 Daytona hands did not fit because the recessed subdials were somewhat different.

Tom did not give it much thought, still convinced, due to the wording on the dial and its lack of a tachymeter, that the dial could only have been intended for a screw-down pusher Daytona. Besides, he was too busy thinking about the appropriate name for his new horological find.

Tom eventually sold the Watch to a Hedge fund Manager for around GBP 40,000, approximately three times the price of an equivalent standard Daytona, who in turn sold it to Eric Clapton at a classic car meeting. A few years later, Tom was visiting the Parma watch fair when a long-standing Middle Eastern vintage watch dealer based in Italy who had seen the ‘Albino’ on Tom’s website, winked at him, saying, “Loved the 6238 Daytona”, letting it be known that he also had purchased a couple of ‘Albino’ 6238s while on his travels in South America a few years earlier. Back then, South America was a veritable El Dorado for vintage watches. This was the moment it dawned on Tom that the dials were, in fact, intended for Ref. 6238 Pre-Daytonas, probably as service parts.

When the very same Watch was sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 for approximately 10 times the price Tom had originally sold it for, after a moment of regret, he realised that something was going drastically wrong with the vintage watch market. Even though swapping dials, cases, and movements was common practice back then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Tom started to concentrate more on the emerging world of interesting contemporary watches, such as Richard Mille, etc.

So there you have it, from the source itself. I want to thank Tom Bolt for his honesty. In a recent CBS Sunday Morning interview where he called himself ‘The Indiana Jones of Watches’—a hilarious nickname given that he sources the majority of his lots from dealers—Aurel Bacs boasted that there will be a 50-million-dollar watch in the future. A 50 million watch could have been a reality long ago if it weren’t for all the fakery and skullduggery the business is plagued with. For the high-end vintage watch world to be cleaned up, to restore trust and reach the heights it could, it will take many more people to step forward like Tom Bolt.

How can it be that these ‘Albino’ dials are service dials for Ref. 6238 when the wording is ‘Rolex Oyster Cosmograph’? Well, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction, as the following 1967 Rolex Daytona advertisement demonstrates. It is unclear whether the depicted watch is a Daytona with a smooth bezel or a Pre-Daytona with a Daytona dial.

The fact is, there are no clearly specified service dials for Ref. 6238. Pre-Daytonas often received a silver Rolex Oyster Cosmograph ‘Sigma’ dial during service. These dials, however, did not preserve the signature all-silver, monochromatic look of the Pre-Daytona, but changed it entirely, creating a different watch altogether.

The all-silver, monochromatic look of the ‘Pre’Daytona’ is unique and stunning. These watches are totally underappreciated.

Perhaps for this reason, and to avoid having to remanufacture discarded clichés featuring tachymeters, Rolex made a special series of ‘Albino’ dials with a contemporary cliché instead. The fact that regular period-correct Daytona hands could not fit, and that each of the three known examples features a different set of subdial hands, tells the whole story.

---

Lot 340 – Rolex Daytona ‘Albino’ Ref. 6263, 2648447

The present watch’s ‘Albino’ dial is real, no doubt. From a forensic perspective, what unveils this watch as a similar third-party construct as Eric Clapton’s ‘Albino’, is the fact that the assembler used almost identical hands, either from a Ref. 6238 or a very early Daytona with a black dial and silver subdials. In any case, these very thin and tapered subdial hands had long been discontinued when Ref. 6263 was introduced in 1969, and the case number of the present watch is from 1971.

Auction link: Lot 340 – Rolex Daytona ‘Albino’ Ref. 6263, 2648447 (sothebys.com)

The comparison below shows that period-correct hands for silver subdials (right) are considerably wider and straight (not tapered). All hands are identical, whereas on the ‘Albino’, the seconds hand differs from 30-minute and 12-hour hand. The seconds hand is very thin and straight. When the present watch was produced, this hand set was long discontinued.

The following comparison shows the present watch next to Eric Clapton’s ‘Albino’. While the subdial hands are very similar, those on Eric Clapton’s ex-watch (right) are slightly shorter.

The photo below from the book Fero – 150 Steel Chronographs, shows the present watch in a revealing perspective. The subdial hands appear to sit unnaturally high.

In the following comparison, it becomes evident that the 30-minute subdial hand on the present watch (left) sits slightly higher above the subdial recess. On Eric Clapton’s ‘Albino’, the hand appears perfectly incorporated. I understand that the angle is not the same, but you get the idea. It looks like either the subdial hands or the pinions were modified to be able to clear the subdial slope. Was this the reason why Tom Bolt’s watchmaker had to use the Ref. 6238 subdial hands?

One thing I can partout not stomach about the present watch, from both an aesthetic and originality point of view, are the patinated ‘Mille Righe’ (Italian for thousand lines) screw-down pushers, where the plating is coming off, and the brass underneath is showing. First of all, this type of pusher is not period-correct for the case number. These would be Ref. 6240 and early Ref. 6263 pushers, if they are real at all. 

The whole ‘Mille Righe’ thing is a science in itself and will require a veritable dissertation to fully grasp the depth of the fakery involved. Anyway, period-correct ‘Mille Righe’ pushers for the present watch would look like the ones in the picture below. They were made of stainless steel, and the knurling was considerably deeper for a better grip.

As mentioned earlier, the present watch was published in the book Fero – 150 Steel Chronographs by Paolo Gobbi. The movement and the inside of the caseback, as shown in the book, are consistent with other pieces in close case-number proximity. The present has an estimated value of USD 500,000 – 1,000,000. It always amazes me when watches with such a price tag are not presented in greater detail in the catalogue. Generally, the pictures Sotheby’s has published in recent years are always awful, unsharp, and too low in resolution.

---

Thoughts

It is amusing to see how so many of these super-rare, top-of-the-range unicorns, unsurprisingly always hyped by the watch world’s most useful idiot, Ben ‘Social’ Clymer of Hoodwinkee, turn out not to be factory-original watches. As with everything in life, it is just a matter of time until all of these myths are debunked. However, while it is clear that the present watch did not leave the Rolex factory in its current form, the ‘Albino’ dials are kinda cool, I must say. Given their rarity—only three examples are known today—they certainly should have their niche and be valued accordingly. It is up to collectors to determine whether a watch born this way is worth their while. As we can see with Space-Dweller dials or the famous dial design proposals found in the Singer books, there is a market for these things. As long as everything is disclosed correctly and not misrepresented as factory-original, there is nothing to say against it. At least now, with the newly revealed information, collectors can make a well-informed investment decision when it comes to the ‘Albino’ Daytonas.

Thank you for your interest.

---

Update December 8, 2025

This article was published two days before the auction. Since Tom Bolt was in Abu Dhabi visiting a friend, I asked him to stop by Sotheby’s and take a closer look at the watch, which he did on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, one day before my article went live. Tom announced himself via text message to Benoît Colson, the head of the watches department in Geneva, and was later welcomed at the Sotheby’s exhibition in the St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort by Sam Hines, the global chairman of watches. After inspecting the watch, Tom disclosed to Sam Hines how he had created the first ‘Albino’ with a Ref. 6238 dial, and that all ‘Albino’ dials were in fact Ref. 6238 service dials. Hines showed no emotion. Tom could not help but take a selfie with the watch, a photo I do not want to withhold from you.

Before leaving, Tom informed Sam Hines that I was working on an article that would disclose everything we know about the ‘Albino’ Daytona Ref. 6263. Despite having all the facts at hand, Sotheby’s did not update their lot essay with the newly gained insights, not even after this article was published. The lot essay continues to make the following claim:

“The origins of the ‘Albino’ dial are unknown…’

The winning bidder was UK watch dealer Kamal Choraria (real name Kamal Jain), who likely bid on the watch for his big client TL. Kamal is known to show up at auctions wearing sunglasses to bid on big watches, but never for himself. He is merely a middleman for collectors who do not want to deal with the whole auction shebang. In one instance, TL got spooked off and refused to pay because someone had trashed the watch, a perfectly fine Daytona Ref. 6264 ‘Lemon’, on Instagram. Kamal, having no money, was sued and blacklisted by the auction house.

In April 2025, Kamal bought the following watch with a stunning tropical dial at auction. I called it out for having a fake Tiffany & Co. print, which is evident when you compare the retailer’s signature to real Tiffany & Co. prints. Observe the short leg of the A and the leaning C of Co. One has to be blind, or stupid, or both to think it is real. The watch fetched EUR 201,500 incl. premium. Later during the auction, Kamal sent me an Instagram message asking me to badmouth another watch so he could also buy it cheaply.

In a recent exchange, Kamal texted me the following regarding this watch:

“You actually did me a huge favour with that post. No one bid on it as you scared the shit out of everyone. And I got it for nothing.”

Anyway, the day after I published this article, Kamal congratulated me via text message, but said the information was nothing new and essentially mirrored his ‘Albino’ article from months ago. To be clear, I did not know about Kamal’s article before he contacted me, nor had I heard anything about it. I knew the truth about the ‘Albino’ since 2020, directly from Tom Bolt.

Kamal contacting me was quite a surprise anyway, as he had publicly called me a cockroach in the past for calling out misrepresented watches at auction, but after realizing how embarrassing his behaviour was, he deleted all his comments. Kamal likes to call people he disagrees with all kinds of animal names. Snake, scorpion, cockroach, you name it. Must be his upbringing. Coming back to the ‘Albino’, when I checked his Instagram two minutes later, I saw he had shared my ‘Albino’ article in his stories, saying it was worth reading and mostly correct. As you can imagine, that felt super weird.

I was, of course, eager to learn what Kamal had written about the ‘Albino’ and so I visited his blog, only to find out that one had to be registered to read his articles. I registered swiftly and asked Kamal to authorize me at once. In a nutshell, this is what the article said:

“The so-called ‘Albino’ dial wasn’t originally designed for the Daytona ref. 6263 at all. It was actually a service dial intended for the Rolex Chronograph ref. 6238, often referred to as the ‘Pre-Daytona’.”

How did he know, I wondered. Kamal then disclosed via text message the history of the Sotheby’s ‘Albino’:

“Btw here is the history of the Sothebys watch. It was originally bought by myself and my partner G on a 6238. We sold the dial only to A [Italian dealer] who put it into a 6263 Daytona and sold it B. B (Italian dealer) then sold it it [sic] to C and his 2 partners. And then I guess it ended up with a private collector and now it’s at Sothebys. All albinos were service dials for predaytonas ref 6238. I asked him [the seller of the 6238] what’s this dial? He said he gave his 6238 with the damaged silver dial for a Rolex service and it came back with this dial.”

That they sold the dial separately made no sense to me. Knowing how dealers think, it would have been much more lucrative for Kamal and his partner to make the watch themselves. Perhaps they did not want to be seen making up watches, who knows. In any case, Kamal seemed to have a vested interest in the Sotheby’s ‘Albino’, so I asked him directly whether he was going to bid on it. He said yes.

The bidding started at USD 450,000 and ended within 90 seconds at USD 750,000, which amounts to a total of USD 952,500 incl. 27% premium. I heard the previous owner had paid nearly USD 3 million for the watch. The day after the auction, Kamal posted another ‘Albino’ story on Instagram:

“With all the drama and hoo and haa results in a 4m dollars watch to be sold for just under 1m dollars. We live in times where influences [sic] are ruling the world.”

This was again super weird, given that he himself had contributed to the drama by not only sharing my article on his Instagram but also agreeing with me. Even more bizarre, the next morning I found the following message from him on my phone:

“Thank you Jose without you it would not be possible to buy it.”

Kamal is a very peculiar person with a criminal past. In the 1990s, he spent seven years or so in a French prison for drug trafficking (sentenced to nine years!) and is banned for life from entering France. In 2001, he was supposed to pick up an important Single Red Sea-Dweller in New York, but due to his drug-related crimes, he is inadmissible under U.S. immigration law and so he had to send his son. He adopted his ex-wife’s family name, Choraria, to try to distance himself from his criminal past. People say his brain is cooked from excessive substance abuse, so winning the ‘Albino’ for his client for a relatively small amount of money might lead to a white Christmas dream come true for him.

Here is a little anecdote that reveals Kamal’s true character. He once got in touch with a client of Tom Bolt, a prominent German car collector. In an attempt to steal the client, Kamal badmouthed Tom Bolt as a heroin addict who went to jail and could not be trusted. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, but more importantly, is this not the very definition of being a snake, cold-blooded and treacherous? It is all projection! The difference between Tom and Kamal is that Tom embraces his past and has even formed a charity, giving money from his own pocket to help other less fortunate addicts recover. In contrast, Kamal, who literally took advantage of addicts and their addiction for monetary gain, tries to distance himself from his criminal past by changing his name.

Anyway, now that he secured the watch for a relatively small amount, Kamal made a 180 on his previous claim that the ‘Albino’ dials were Ref. 6238 service dials. Let’s reiterate what he said before the auction:

“The so-called ‘Albino’ dial wasn’t originally designed for the Daytona ref. 6263 at all. It was actually a service dial intended for the Rolex Chronograph ref. 6238, often referred to as the ‘Pre-Daytona’.”

Now he is claiming the following:

“The Albino dial was originally designed for the Rolex Daytona ref 6263 but the project was shelved.”

And:

“The Albino dials, I can only assume, were shelved as they were very similar to the silver Pre-Daytona chronograph dials Ref 6238 …”

This statement makes little sense, given that Ref. 6238 had been discontinued for several years when Ref. 6263 was introduced. Being similar would not have mattered at all. 

Kamal’s flip-flopping on the ‘Albino’ has all the hallmarks of a double bluff. Being a forensic horological investigator, I normally operate on facts alone, but on this occasion, I am going to take a little stab in the dark as to what went down with the purchase and sale of this Frankenstein watch.

One week after Sotheby’s announced the ‘Albino’ on Instagram (August 28, 2025), Kamal published his article on his members-only blog (September 4, 2025). The guy has 470 followers on Instagram, and there is no dedicated post referring to his article. Only a few people might have read his article, if any at all, but a wide reach was probably never the goal. He had a larger account once, but Instagram shut it down, probably because of his foul-mouthed comments.

Interestingly, I had hinted to one of the Sotheby’s specialists that I was going to take apart the ‘Albino’ myth, only hours after their announcement. The world of watch auctions is very small. I suspect that within minutes, the news got out to several big shots in the business. Is it far-fetched to think that Kamal heard about this through the grapevine? Knowing I would target the watch, perhaps he hatched a plan to harness the destructive power of Perezcope to his own advantage, as he had profited from with the tropical Tiffany.

The problem with having a watch destroyed by Perezcope is that there is no coming back. But if you can make the case to a collector that you were responsible for getting the watch to sell for a low price by badmouthing it to other potential buyers and, in so doing, scaring off other bidders, it may work. So, knowing what I was going to reveal about the ‘Albino’, and that my exposés are usually published within days of an auction, Kamal went way ahead of me and published the story on his members-only blog three months before the auction to make it look as if I had obtained the damning information from him.

Kamal’s article was probably read by a handful of people, especially since it was only accessible to registered users. A broad reach was never the goal. If he wanted that, the article would have been open to the public. The minimal way Kamal talked down the watch is consistent with the actions of someone paying lip service only. Someone wanting to be seen as talking down the price of a watch without genuinely trying to stand by the narrative of their article.

Perhaps the conversation went something like this. Kamal:

“Wow, did I do a good job on talking down the sale price of that Albino or what? Even Perezcope and Watch Guru jumped on the bandwagon because of what I said! So, what shall we say is fair for my cut, bearing in mind that I managed to buy a USD 4 million watch for USD 1 million?”

Kamal may even have told his client that he had other interested parties who would buy it off him for $2 million right away, anyway, to set a marker for what his remuneration should be. Another important detail is that Kamal lied in Instagram comments, saying that Tom Bolt was the underbidder, trying to both lend legitimacy to the watch while intimating he was playing the same game through his previous revelatory posts.

Kamal’s icing on the horological cake of deception is that he posted how he had used social media influencers to help him talk down the price of a hugely expensive watch to make his buyer feel secure as to the uplift he was paying Kamal to own a watch that was costing him much more than the auction sale price.

To conclude, Kamal’s knowledge is very limited, as we can see with the fake tropical Tiffany. He primarily relies on his partner, an Italian dial restorer known for his excellent, almost undetectable work. Kamal should not be dreaming of a white Christmas just yet, as this story is still evolving.

---

Related articles

• Space Junk – The reality of the infamous Rolex ‘Space-Dweller’
• Shocking! Rolex caught restoring fake vintage watches
• Dangerously inept! Rolex ‘Atelier de Restauration’ and a fake Daytona ‘Oyster Sotto’