The picture of a small business owner checking his phone for security camera alerts before he even makes his coffee in the morning is a little unsettling. That’s what Umit Berkant had to deal with every day. He opened Blacklist Cards and Collectibles in Thomastown just a few weeks before thieves broke in and stole more than $20,000 worth of Pokémon cards. He had just enough time to figure out when he would be open before calling the police.
In the past few years, Melbourne’s collectible card scene has grown a lot. Holographic card trading used to be a niche hobby that happened on school playgrounds. Now, it’s grown into a serious secondary market where rare singles can fetch more than $1,000 each and an original Charizard in mint condition has sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars around the world. The Pokémon Trading Card Game has been around since the mid-1990s, but Ryan Street, owner of General Games, recently said that more cards have been printed in the last four years than in all the decades before that. Because of the growth, investors, tax collectors, and, it turns out, career criminals have come to the area.
Collectible card stores have been broken into in at least thirteen suburbs across Melbourne, ranging from Thomastown in the north to Caroline Springs in the west to Eumemmering in the southeast. Police are currently looking into the crimes. According to store owners who have put together what they know from shared security footage and casual group chats, the method seems to work every time. Cars were stolen. Weed tools. Wheelie bins were brought in to move goods out. Clean work that is done quickly. Street thinks that the total value of the cards that were stolen at these places is about $1 million, which is a conservative estimate.
This past week, someone broke into Bailey Craig’s store in Eumemmering and stole more than $100,000. He talked about what happened afterward in the way that someone would talk about how something they worked hard on getting broken. “We put a lot of work here to make a great space for our community,” he said. His words make it sound like the loss wasn’t just money, but also something personal. These aren’t warehouse tasks. A lot of people come there to play, trade, and talk about cards they’ve been after for years.
All of this is harder to understand because the pattern seems so well put together. Street has said that the people responsible are well-coordinated, clear about what they want, quick on their feet, and knowledgeable about the card market enough to put the right product first. The police haven’t said for sure if the two incidents are connected, and their investigation is still going on, but store owners have already come to their own conclusions. If you see the same method used in several suburbs, it’s hard not to make the connection.
It might be harder to put a number on the industry’s mental damage than on its financial damage. At least one store in Melbourne has reportedly stopped selling Pokémon cards altogether because they are a security risk. As soon as Berkant wakes up, he checks his phone for camera alerts. Street says straight out that the situation has made people very suspicious. It’s worth pausing on that word — paranoia — because it suggests something beyond reasonable caution. These business owners aren’t making things up. They’re reacting to a real pattern that’s getting worse.
Also, the insurance issue is always there, waiting to be dealt with. If this rate of burglaries keeps up, premiums will go up. That could tip the scales in ways that no single heist can quite capture on its own for small, independent stores that are already making very little money.
People still think of Pokémon cards when they want to remember their childhood, which could be one reason why most people don’t fully understand how bad this theft wave is. But there is a market. It is true that they lost. While you read this, a store owner in Melbourne is looking at their phone to see if tonight is their night.
