It’s almost like a scene from a movie: a man walks into a Las Vegas trading card store, sits down, and pretends to look around. He then waits for the store to empty out, and then pulls out a Taser. Gun-free. Not a demand for what’s in a safe. He was going after a glass case with Pokémon cards in it. It sounds like a joke ending. It’s not one.
The event was caught on camera at Crossing Las Vegas, a trading card store in the valley. Employees said that a suspect would come and go from the store for hours, looking at the shelves and watching the staff. He would only move when it was quiet. Someone in sales said, “We thought he was just a normal customer.” You read it again afterward and feel a little silly that you didn’t read it sooner, even though there was no good reason to.
Several thefts have turned Pokémon card shops into high-value targets in the past year or so. This latest incident is the latest in a long line of losses.
This year, several card shops have been broken into in Las Vegas alone. It’s harder to ignore the pattern on a national level. A smash-and-grab at Elite Sports Cards in Chicago got rid of about $100,000 worth of goods in one night. Over forty people were locked inside a Pokémon store in New York City by three armed men who pointed weapons at them. The men then left with more than $110,000 in cash and merchandise. It only took thieves 39 seconds in Brentwood, California, to take cards worth $15,000. The whole thing was caught on surveillance video, which makes it seem both more real and less real at the same time.
Even though the size of it still shocks people, it’s not hard to figure out what’s behind this. Pokémon cards have been around since the late 1990s, but they have been tucked away in closets and attics for many years. After that, the pandemic happened. People who were stuck at home started going through old clothes and toys again. People were bored and nostalgic, so the market responded. The prices went up. Auction records went down. This year, Logan Paul, the former YouTuber turned boxer, sold a very rare Pikachu card for $16.5 million. A Pikachu artist who makes £832,000. A Charizard worth £442,800. These aren’t just guesses; these are actual sales prices.
Shops in Warrington, Rugby, Bristol, Bournemouth, Peterborough, and Nottingham, among other places in the UK, have been robbed in similar “smash and grab” ways. The shop owner in Cheshire said the thieves came in a transit van, blocked the security cameras with brooms, and were out of the store in four minutes. The stock was worth about £60,000. “Thieves know Pokémon is profitable,” said Roy Raftery, an expert on trading cards who has helped sell over two million Pokémon himself. “They think it’s an easier target than robbing a bank or a jewellery shop.”
It makes sense to think about that. A Pokémon card is small, light, and can be worth a lot of money to the right person. Metal detectors don’t pick it up. It moves in unofficial markets that accept cash. A store owner in Edmonton is said to have said that some cards were used as illegal money. It’s hard to tell if that’s completely true or if it’s been added on, but the meaning behind it is real: for a different type of investor, these cards now have the same speculative weight as gold did.
Seeing how everything is going makes you think that the collector market got ahead of the systems that were put in place to protect it. Card shops are places to shop, not safes. The security systems they had were made for shoplifting, not for big-time theft. The theft in Las Vegas happened during normal business hours, in broad daylight, with staff present. More than anything else, that shows a change in how brazen these acts have become.
It’s still not clear whether the police see this as a coordinated pattern or a series of random crimes. A glass display case full of cardboard is no longer a simple target, that much is clear. For people who traded Charmanders on the school playground during the summer as a kid, that thought takes a moment to sink in.
