Recently in England, a business owner faces a significant loss due to thieves making away with Pokemon TCG (Trading Card Game) cards worth over 1 million dollars. The crime took place in Newton Aycliffe, where the thieves broke into the business owner’s warehouse, ransacking it and took off with a sizable collection of rare Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering cards. The loss is estimated to be around 1.2 million dollars which is genuinely insane yet this isn’t the first time the business owner, Adrian Marsden suffered such a loss.
Why They Keep Occurring
Mr. Marsden took a loss like this back in June of 2023 when thieves similarly broke into his warehouse stealing various card collections totaling a fortune. Another theft took place in California last year too, when a store lost pokemon cards amounting to 1 million dollars when thieves drove the back of their flatbed truck into the glass doors of the store and took boxes full of rare cards and got away within 7 minutes.
To understand why these kinds of crimes keep happening and what we can do to minimize them we have to get to the heart of the issue, the allure of rare trading cards.
These limited-edition cards of various genres have become more and more expensive due to the want of buyers wanting to pay any price to obtain a full set of these cards. Due to this shops who find and sell these cards often fetch staggering and eye watering prices almost reaching upwards of two to three hundred thousand dollars.
This is now becoming a double-edged sword as these excruciating values make them a prime target for thefts. The thefts themselves are getting more and more sophisticated due to the high prices that fetch these cards as some camera footages show the organization of some of these thefts. The nature of the item itself makes it difficult to prove if the card really belongs to the victim or not due to the cards being kept in a pristine condition, as even a scratch would devalue it by almost its entire amount.
These crimes have made most card collectors and enthusiasts alike lose trust amongst each other and more and more wary and guarded of their collection and avoiding to share and show what they possess for fear of them targeted and the cards being stolen. While others have decided to sell their massive collection for the significant payout and/or minimizing the risk of owning it.
A Solution In Sight?
Trying to combat these crimes is tricky to say the least. Law Enforcement must first begin to understand the want the value of these cards and identify how and where they are being resold. First and foremost, current collection owners should take more precautionary measures when showing casing their cards and implementing more secure anti-theft systems wherever they store them.
Secondly, Law Enforcement must identify places that store these rare cards for sale such as the mentioned warehouses and ensure that only the bare minimum and required personnel visit them and no one else, this would help ensure the least amount of people know about the location of these cards.
Finally, Law Enforcement and members of the community should work together and share crucial information about these special cards to facilitate better tracking and hopefully repossessing them from unwanted hands.
The Market Is Still Growing
Despite the aforementioned crimes and its effects on the community the market for these cards only continue to grow. Even popular content creators are joining in, showing of their rare cards being worth upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Thus, lots of smaller, newer creators have come out showing off their cases of rare, exquisite cards garnering millions of views and potentially those that would commit felonies and crimes to obtain them for profit.
