A Pokemon trading card shop in Japan is offering a cash reward for anyone who successfully captures a thief that broke into the store. While burgled card shops typically work with the police to try and find the culprit, this is an unusual move for a Pokemon TCG store to make.
Card thieves breaking into stores to steal high-value Pokemon cards has become unfortunately common news in recent years. Generally, these thefts are committed while stores are closed, or the thieves choose to break into Pokemon TCG store warehouses rather than storefronts. While it’s always a relief when no one is harmed during moments like these, some business owners seem to be getting more than fed up with the prevalence of theft.
Pokemon TCG Shop Offers Cash Reward for Thief’s Capture
Now, a store in Japan called Kaitorip is offering a 1 million yen bounty for a thief that broke in on July 22. Kaitorip has shared surveillance footage of the thief making off with cards, as well as the broken front door that they got in through. The store owner has stipulated that the thief must be handed over alive in order to receive the 1 million yen bounty, which converts to about $6,100 USD. The shop is also offering a secondary reward of 50,000 yen for anyone who has solid information on the thief’s identity, or roughly $305 USD.
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There are rare Pokemon cards that have sold for stunning prices all over the world, making them popular targets for thieves. Since the cards have no unique identifiers, it can also be hard to prove that a card has been stolen. It’s not known how much was stolen in terms of overall value, but chances are it’s more than the reward being offered for the thief’s capture. In Pokemon TCG thefts in the past, some thieves have made off with as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars or even over a million dollars worth of stolen Pokemon cards.
Though this and every other Pokemon TCG theft are unfortunate situations, it could have been worse. The details indicate that this theft transpired at about 3 in the morning. Unfortunately, in some cases, brazen robbers have actually stolen Pokemon cards from stores while they’ve been open, terrorizing and sometimes even injuring employees and customers in the process. Thankfully, it seems that no one was harmed or put in physical danger in this case in Japan.
While Pokemon card thefts are a serious problem that needs to be resolved somehow, it’s not the only difficulty facing the card game. The scalping of Pokemon TCG has been bad enough to gain the attention of the government of Japan, which is putting together a task force to combat scalping. Individual stores and The Pokemon Company itself are also cracking down, with implemented measures ranging from requiring customers to correctly answer Pokemon quizzes or as extreme as requiring government IDs or instituting facial recognition scans of Pokemon TCG buyers. Time will tell if these efforts — and the card shop bounty being offered — create the results the card game needs.