Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A premium smartwatch lineup approaching its yearly flagship launch sees hype bubble to a fever pitch, only for an alleged release-ready unit to land on a third-party marketplace. Spoiler: it happened exactly two months ago with the Galaxy Watch 8 Classic, and it happened again today with the Pixel Watch 4, which isn’t expected to hit shelves for another two months.

The images are extremely convincing

But there’s one huge tell

After breaking a set of scraped, official renders days ago, and hyping up the entire upcoming Pixel line’s new official imagery, I’ve stared at these devices more than is probably healthy for the last few days. If our tipster (Thanks, Armando!) had shown me only the Mercari listing’s images, I’d probably have given the way-too-early resale a good bit of credence (Source: Mercari).

But context matters, and here it is: the Pixel Watch 4 is slated to cost $350. Not only that, it’s in such limited supply that Google had to delay its launch (although that also happened with the Pixel Watch 3, so it’s not some crazy occurrence). And, to be sure, Pixel Watch releases get tons of hype, and nobody is as fervently dedicated to their favorite tech brand as Pixel fans (that’s a compliment, I swear).

The problem, with no further ado, is the listing’s $200 asking price. A million fanboys would love to get their wrists on this device, which is so rare that one of the world’s biggest companies said it can’t make them fast enough to meet the originally suspected launch date. And it’s going for basically half the MSRP?

Yeah, right. Next you’ll try to convince me the Galaxy S series will come with Exynos processors in the US. Don’t be ridiculous. Furthermore, the images are pretty scarce. There’s only one low-light, in-box shot of the actual watch, and as real as it may look, there’s zero proof it’s operational.

Granted, I could theoretically be wrong. That only happens once or twice a year, but the box does look pretty darn authentic. A brief, surface-level analysis reveals only typical JPG noise, indicating the images themselves are likely unaltered. On the other hand, it’d be extremely simple to print a product box mimicking the Pixel Watch 3’s package dimensions, and print the respective details on the back in multiple languages. It’s not like there are any secrets left about the hardware, after all.

At the end of the day, there’s no definitive way to tell if it’s real or not, other than placing the order and accepting delivery. My editors won’t commission the buy, and I’m not gambling my own $200, though. Because I’m willing to bet this isn’t a stolen Pixel Watch 4 release unit, or a firing-worthy breach of contract. It’s probably a counterfeit, and a good lesson to take everything on the internet with a grain of salt.

It’d sure be wild if it were real, though.