Thieves Allegedly Steal $70,000 Worth of Pokémon Cards After Asking Store Staff Which Were Valuable [IGN]

Thieves are once again targeting the Pokémon Trading Card Game, with a duo in Japan allegedly making off with $70,000 worth after asking staff which ones were valuable.

As reported by NHK and translated by ComicBook, a Pokémon TCG store in Osaka was allegedly broken into at 3:30am while a pair of employees were closing up. The perpetrators tied the workers up and demanded not the Pokémon cards themselves, but insight into which ones were worth taking.

Pokémon card thefts are on the rise given how valuable some cards are (the rarest sold in 2022 for more than $5 million), but as tens of thousands of individual cards exist, not to mention countless copies of most of them, it can be hard to differentiate between the good cardboard and the bad cardboard.

The alleged Osaka thieves seemingly didn’t do their research, similar to a group in the California who were mocked by staff in January, and had to ask the employees which cards were valuable.

The staff seemingly knew their stuff though, as the thieves made off with more than 100 cards valued at ¥10 million, roughly $70,000.

Tokyo police reported an unprecedented number of trading card thefts in the latter half of 2022. High profile examples include a Minnesota store reportedly having around $250,000 worth of cards stolen, a Tokyo man allegedly launching a full on heist to acquire cards, and even an Alabama policeman was allegedly fired for pocketing cards in Walmart.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.