It’s almost like a movie scene that a thief walks into the store owned by the most decorated quarterback in NFL history, fakes a card swipe, and then walks out with almost $10,000 worth of trading cards under his arm. No broken glass. Not a crowbar. As soon as the clerk tapped on a terminal, the person was gone. They had no reason to doubt the machine.
This is what took place at CardVault by Tom Brady in SoHo, Manhattan, around October 20. The suspect tried to buy both baseball cards and Pokémon cards, according to the NYPD. When the transaction failed, the man didn’t put the cards back; instead, he entered prompts into the payment terminal by hand that skipped over the failed transaction completely, making the clerk think the sale went through. He left the store with goods worth $9,700. That was after only a few weeks of being open.
It’s a sharp theft that’s almost annoying. Not force or smash-and-grab. To take advantage of a weakness that most retail workers wouldn’t think twice about, you had to know enough about how card readers work. That part stays with me. It wasn’t a bad idea. Either someone had done this before or they took the time to figure out how to do it without making a fuss.
CardsVault is one link in a longer chain that Brady has been putting together since he stopped playing football professionally in 2023. There are now places in Dallas, Chicago, Boston, New Jersey, Connecticut, and two places in New York. Around the time this story came out, a Mall of America branch was set to open. Brady has also become a lead analyst for Fox Sports and bought small shares in the Las Vegas Raiders, the Las Vegas Aces, and Birmingham City FC. He seems to really care about the collectibles market, and not just as a way to get endorsements. CardVault has left a trace to show it.
When you look at the bigger picture, though, the SoHo theft doesn’t seem so out of place. The robbery was seen by Sports Illustrated as part of a bigger trend that could be measured. Pokémon, baseball, and football trading cards are some of the more popular high-value items that thieves are looking to steal. It’s no secret why they like it. The cards are small and easy to carry around. Depending on what’s in a pack or binder, they could be worth thousands of dollars if you sell them. There isn’t a serial number. Not a single identifier. It’s almost impossible to find them once they’re out the door.
The numbers from other parts of the industry make the SoHo incident look small. Over $110,000 was stolen from a card shop in Massachusetts overnight. Thieves stole more than $2 million worth of baseball cards from the 2024 Dallas Card Show. One of the cards stolen was a 1952 Mickey Mantle card worth $175,000 by itself. A store in Osaka, Japan, lost about $70,000 worth of Pokémon cards all at once.
People who collect things sometimes feel that the market’s popularity has made it a problem. A hobby that used to be kept in dusty cardboard boxes in basements has turned into a serious secondary industry. Graded cards can now be bought at auction for six figures and are sold in stores in busy cities. That level of visibility is both a strength and a weakness.
So far, no one has been caught in the SoHo case. There is surveillance video, but the suspect is still on the run. The exact cards that were stolen haven’t been made public, which could be done on purpose to keep information secret so that nothing shows up on the secondary market and alerts the authorities. It’s still not clear if this was a planned job or one that was taken because it was available. Both are possible. Neither one is comforting.
It will be interesting to see if CardVault and other well-known stores start to rethink their security measures, including not only the cameras and staff rules but also the payment technology itself. The need for a terminal that a customer can override by hand was clearly seen by more than one person.
