Mark Li had no idea that a card would be sprayed with pepper. He was merely attempting to sell two pieces of cardstock through Facebook Marketplace outside a Burnaby, British Columbia, home. Of course, the cardstock was worth about $20,000. The meeting appeared to be standard. After confirming the authenticity of the cards, one of the buyers turned to his partner and said, “Get him.” Li took hold of one of them, held on for a moment, and then lost sight. He stood there, blinded, as the suspects vanished with his cards.
What came next was more than a police report. It became part of an increasingly unsettling trend that online card communities have been surreptitiously monitoring for months, sometimes more quickly and efficiently than local law enforcement.
After responding to five similar cases in less than a week, Vancouver police decided to conduct an undercover investigation. On March 27, officers arrested a man in his 20s while posing as sellers and listing cards online. It was successful. The more difficult question, though, is worth considering: why did it take five attacks in a single week to receive a response?
The Pokémon card collecting subreddits on Reddit, which have hundreds of thousands of members, have created something unofficial but surprisingly successful. Photos of pilfered cards with serial numbers, PSA grades, and distinctive markings are shared by collectors. Others quickly report questionable listings on Facebook Marketplace, TCGPlayer, and eBay. There’s a good chance that someone in the community will spot someone attempting to move stolen inventory online. Cash and cards are not the same. Fingerprints are left by the rare ones.
The number of recoveries that can be directly attributed to these internet tips as opposed to official police action is still unknown. However, collectors will tell you that the numbers don’t look good for law enforcement. Cards are actually more difficult to trace than electronics, as Sgt. Tige Pollock of the Surrey Police Service pointed out earlier this year. There would be mixed reactions from the community. Because the cards can be traced if you know what to look for, they have created unofficial registries.
The value of the cards themselves has increased along with the scope of the theft issue. Within minutes, robbers in Abbotsford stole about $30,000 worth of cards after using a car to rip security grates off a storefront. One January break-in cost a store in New Westminster about $20,000. Jesse Peng, a collector and co-owner of a trading card store in Richmond, British Columbia, stores his most valuable items in an offsite bank vault. One such item is a 1998 Pikachu Illustrator, which he believes could be worth about $4 million. “We don’t keep them at the shop, we don’t keep them at the house,” he stated. His logic is straightforward: banks and jewelry stores are thought to be more difficult targets than card shops.
When Pokémon cards returned, nobody anticipated this kind of world. The franchise began in Japan in 1996, evolved into an anime series and Game Boy game, and then largely vanished. In 2016, Pokémon Go revived it. Millennials with nostalgia were drawn to Nintendo Switch games. Then, at some point in the early 2020s, the cards changed completely, turning into a flex, a portfolio hedge, or a speculative asset. Professional Sports Authenticator data shows that prices have increased by approximately 1,350% since 2020. According to reports, cryptocurrency money has begun to come in. Before toy stores open, people who used to casually browse the shelves now form lines in parking lots.
There’s a feeling that the organizations designed to keep people safe haven’t quite kept up with the current state of Pokémon cards. They resemble nostalgia from childhood. They work more like tiny gold bars. Most people don’t seem to understand this as well as Reddit communities do. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the collectors themselves are most driven to solve these thefts; this isn’t necessarily because they don’t trust the police, but rather because they move quickly and have context that others don’t.
It’s genuinely unclear if that unofficial network can keep up with increasingly organized theft rings. However, in an odd turn of events, communities that were established to capture fictional animals are now among the more dependable methods of apprehending card thieves.
