by Thieves are targeting the Pokémon Trading Card Game again. A duo from Japan reportedly made off with $70,000 worth of cards after asking staff which cards were valuable.
As reported by NHK and translated by ComicBook, a Pokémon TCG store in Osaka was reportedly broken into at 3:30 a.m. while two employees were closing up. The perpetrators tied up the employees and demanded not the Pokémon cards themselves, but insight into which ones were worth taking.
Pokémon card theft is on the rise, given the value of some cards (the rarest sold for over $5 million in 2022). But with tens of thousands of individual cards in existence, and many of them in countless copies, it can be difficult to distinguish good from bad.
The alleged Osaka thieves apparently failed to do their research, as did a group in California who were laughed at by staff in January and had to ask employees which cards were valuable.
However, the staff seemed to know what they were doing, as the thieves made off with more than 100 cards worth a total of ¥10 million, which is about $70,000.
Tokyo police reported an unprecedented number of collectible card thefts in the second half of 2022. Notable examples include a store in Minnesota where approximately $250,000 worth of cards were reportedly stolen, a man in Tokyo who reportedly committed an outright robbery to obtain cards, and even an Alabama police officer who was reportedly fired for pocketing cards at Walmart.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance reporter for IGN. He talks about The Witcher all day long.
