Abstract We report the virial measurements of the black hole (BH) mass of a sample of 17 type 2 active galactic nuclei (AGN), drawn from the Swift/BAT 70-month 14–195 keV hard X-ray catalogue, where a faint BLR component has been measured via deep NIR (0.8–2.5 μm) spectroscopy. We compared the type 2 AGN with a control sample of 33 type 1 AGN. We find that the type 2 AGN BH masses span the 5 < log(M BH/M⊙) < 7.5 range, with an average log(M BH/M⊙) = 6.7, which is ∼0.8 dex smaller than found for type 1 AGN. If type 1 and type 2 AGN of the same X-ray luminosity log( $L_{\rm 14{\rm -}195}$ /erg s−1) ∼ 43.5 are compared, type 2 AGN have 0.5 dex smaller BH masses than type 1 AGN. Although based on few tens of objects, this result disagrees with the standard AGN unification scenarios in which type 1 and type 2 AGN are the same objects observed along different viewing angles with respect to a toroidal absorbing material.