Most people wouldn’t have thought it would happen. A few years ago, Pokémon cards were a throwback. You could find them in a shoebox under the bed and maybe get a few dollars for them at a garage sale. Today, they’re being bought, sold, and stolen in Vancouver and the rest of the Lower Mainland at a rate that has even surprised the police.
In April of this year, Sgt. Ryan Campbell of the Vancouver Police Department told the press that he hadn’t been paying attention to the Pokémon card market until it got violent. Being honest means something. You can tell that the money is real when police start to learn about a collectibles market through reports of theft.
In any case, what happened at the end of March 2026 was shocking. Five days in a row, people who had posted cards on Facebook Marketplace were tricked into public gatherings and asked to show their cards so that they could be looked at. They were then bear-sprayed and robbed. Police caught the suspect, a man in his 20s, through a sting operation in which they posted a card online and set up the meeting. There were two cards found. The things that were stolen were worth a total of about $6,000 all together. To put trading cards.
These days, walking through Richmond or Surrey makes you feel like the way people think about this hobby has changed for real. More security has been put in place at stores that sell trading cards. Some stores are taking out all of their valuable items from display cases and only selling things above a certain price by appointment. Max Wong, co-owner of Team Collectors in Richmond, has seen this change firsthand. The store that used to feel like a casual collector’s dream now has to deal with the same issues as a jewelry store.
A lot of these things happened because of the pandemic. When people were stuck at home, they started looking through old card collections and looking up prices online. This is when they realized that the things they had thought were just childhood junk had quietly become an alternative asset class. At the same time, famous people like Logan Paul started opening packs live on stream for huge crowds of people who had never thought twice about Pokémon before. Prices changed in a big way because of it. Values reportedly went up ten times over for some cards, and some have kept going up since then. In February, Logan Paul sold a very rare Pikachu card for more than $22 million Canadian. A card that he bought in 2021 for about $7.1 million.
When people see that number, it changes how they feel about a hobby. It also changes the people who are involved, and not always for the better.
As an adult, William Chong has been in the card business since he was a child and runs a collectibles store in Scarborough. He said it clearly: when demand is higher than what people can afford, some people start to think about taking instead of buying. This is a simple equation that has been having an effect on Vancouver. Early this year, thieves broke into card shops in Abbotsford and Surrey and took items worth tens of thousands of dollars. These are not random smash-and-grabs done out of a sense of duty. They gave them the name of someone who knew exactly what they needed.
It’s still not clear if Vancouver has a cultural connection to this boom or if its location and population have just made it a visible hub in a trend that’s happening all over the country. However, the number of incidents—the thefts, the specialty stores, and the police response—does suggest that something is really taking root here in a unique way.
If you’re a collector who wants to play this market honestly, Chong’s advice is good: you can’t just open packs and hope for rare cards. It takes more time to trade up, learn values, and make friends in the community. It costs between $10 and $15 for a single pack. You can look through hundreds of them and still not find anything valuable. A lot of the time, cards that are really valuable are ones that aren’t being played anymore. This makes the market more about who knows what and who can find whom.
Vancouver is finding out the hard way that a market that is serious enough to bring in collectors is also serious enough to bring in everyone else.
