A late-night robbery has claimed nearly $140,000 in Pokemon cards from a card shop in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. On December 10th, two masked robbers broke into “Trading Card Highlight” and stole over 300 Pokemon cards. The store estimates the cards were worth 20 million yen.
https://twitter.com/highlight_poke/status/1733721913040789827?t=YNYuVjA3Id3BoPhRU9cFtQ&s=19
If true they knew what they were going after…I hope the shop publishes a list of cards so people can be on the lookout for suspicious lots online.
Went from PSA 7-8 to PSA 2 real quick with that hammer action
They just needed those waifus
This is why all my LGS in the area pack up all the higher end cards and put them in a safe in a discrete location outside of the shop daily. Thieves are gross
Theft tends to be a lot less common in Japan than North America so I can see why a store may be ill-prepared for such an incident.
That said, I did visit a number of card shops that did not display the actual high-value card out front (just an image showing the card they had, condition, price). On the other hand, a number of shops just had 4 figure cards (Fan Club Eevee, No Rarity Charizard, Illustrator Zorua) out in the open…
Smash and grab has been an effective strategy for man for thousands of years.
This is precisely why the cert # information for graded cards ought to be on record at the shop, so that if they turn up they can try to trace it back to those involved.
I’m sure it’s totally unrealistic given the players involved, but I wonder if there would be merit in PSA etc. implementing the option to report certs stolen (with proof) and then have them flag in the system on cert lookups/sales? Obviously sellers can stay away from platforms like eBay or hide cert info but for those dumb enough not to it would definitely provide more visibility to that type of scenario.
Whoever stole graded cards could simply crack it out of the slab and sell raw with no trace.
You’re not wrong, but lots of cards lose a lot of value once cracked. There are obvious exceptions, but $140k in graded cards can quickly become far less than that when cracked. Those who are smart would crack them, but I’d imagine that some wouldn’t still
I suppose an exception to this would be if someone cracked and re-subbed the card, which is quite the scheme going on at that stage.
Keep in mind this is also Japan where graded cards are not as prevalent as other markets. I would bet most of these were raw.
Agreed, if they are cracking and re-submitting that would be wild. At that point they might as well join E4 and sign up for The Great graded results thread. Maybe they join a secret society. Maybe they’re already amongst us…
That line will now always remind me of my twins 