With there being little sign of the Pokémon TCG bubble bursting any time soon, and many Pokémon cards literally worth more than their weight in gold, it’s becoming all too normal to hear stories of thieves breaking into stores and stealing the shiny cardboard. A particularly audacious example happened in California this weekend, where around $100,000 worth of cards were stolen by a masked gang in a matter of minutes—a gang who could well be responsible for a number of other similar crimes.
As reported by local LA station KTLA 5 (thanks IGN), a group of burglars were filmed on CCTV breaking into the Burbank card shop and making off with armfuls of Pokémon cards. The implication from store owner Kiet Nguyen’s description of the footage is that the team seem very experienced, getting in and out of the store in just a couple of minutes, seemingly knowing exactly what they wanted to take.
“They tip over and smash a glass display case to grab its contents,” Nguyen told KTLA. “Moments later, they’re seen carrying three large bags filled with stolen goods to an awaiting getaway car. The vast majority, they were targeting Pokémon cards. They inadvertently took some lock boxes from the back that also had [rare] sports cards.”
KTLA goes on to report that the police suspect this particular gang of three could be responsible for a number of similar card shop break-ins around Southern California, not least because this particular burglary seemed so practiced.
It’s not an exaggeration about the price of gold thing, by the way. I just looked it up; the average Pokémon card weighs just under two grams, and the same weight in gold is currently worth around $270. The Mega Charizard X ex SIR in the current Phantasmal Flames set is currently selling for $600, while new sealed product sells on resale markets for at least twice its MSRP. Meanwhile, a sealed booster box of 2021’s Evolving Skies currently sells for $2,350, some eighteen times the original store price.
This is not only making Pokémon cards close to impossible for regular fans to buy or even find on sale, but also making the product increasingly high-risk for stores given the suddenly ballooning value of their stocks. Nguyen had thought his Burbank store to be well protected in a safe area, saying that he believed, with his multiple layers of security, “the deterrents were good enough.” Sadly not.
Clearly, given the incentives and ease with which stolen sealed product and non-graded cards can be resold, breaking into a card shop is now a more lucrative crime than breaking into a jewelry store, with less protection likely to be in place, but a far easier time grabbing the equally valuable loot.
