The Pokémon crime wave: How nostalgic collectables became the new gold
When you think of lucrative robberies, you likely immediately picture big wads of cash being carried out of banks. Well, either that, or burglars making off with high-value items they could easily exchange for cash.
That’s why many such ‘high-value items’ are kept firmly under lock and key. Besides, the likes of jewellery and gold bars are notoriously heavy. Easier for the criminals to nab smaller, lighter pieces – like… trading cards!
Yes, believe it or not, these rectangular squares of cardboard have recently soared in value. Not all of them, though. Often, it’s been those from yesteryear featuring Pokémon and sports stars. It’s left us at Crime+Investigation keen to find out more about why these particular collectables have become so eagerly targeted by thieves.
The trading card renaissance
Many of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s will fondly remember the trading card craze that took hold back then. Bustling school playgrounds were the ideal places for kids to swap cards emblazoned with the visages of big-name athletes like Michael Jordan and David Beckham.
Then the Pokémon video game franchise launched in 1996, and kids found themselves with yet another card-based obsession. This time, it was the Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG), which went some way towards making the cartoon creatures Pikachu, Charizard and Squirtle pop-culture icons.
Two decades later, the kids who once couldn’t get enough of those cards were now adults who had long since abandoned them. That was until the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Millennials dug out their old cards and realised how much money they could make by selling them.
Why have these cards exploded in value?
Since 2004, the monetary value of Pokémon cards has soared by 3,821% in value, far outstripping the S&P 500’s contemporaneous return rate. For many people of a certain age, the mere sight of these cards is bound to rekindle nostalgic childhood memories.
The Pokémon franchise has also regularly seen periods of renewed relevance, such as when the augmented reality game Pokémon GO launched in 2016. The same can be said of ‘legacy’ sports stars, with Michael Jordan and David Beckham having both starred in popular Netflix documentaries in the 2020s.
Whether a vintage card features a superstar athlete or a Pokémon, it can – at least provided it’s in good condition – fetch big, big money. Even people with little interest in spectator sports or cutesy monsters have come to see these cards as potential investment assets. Unfortunately, such enterprising people have increasingly included criminals, too.
Gotta catch ‘em all – the criminals, that is
Around 2:30am on 8th July 2025, a shadowy figure broke into the 1st Edition Collectibles shop in New Bedford, Massachusetts. They subsequently raided a display cabinet and escaped with multiple rare Pokémon cards – including five Charizards, one Blastoise and two booster boxes.
The climactic moment was filmed on CCTV, with the burglar’s haul of Pokémon cards worth over $100,000. Later that month, two people tipped off the police about a local man attempting to sell cards matching those stolen from the shop. The 24-year-old Richard Jovahn Nunes was soon arrested in connection with the theft.
The huge popularity of Pokémon has some similarly worrying implications for retail bosses here in the UK. Pokémon cards were among the inventory stolen from the County Durham warehouse of Total Cards in June 2023. The company’s insurer, Allianz, valued the missing items at more than £1 million altogether.
When a devious hotel worker didn’t play ball
Sports cards certainly haven’t been spared by thieves, either. In April 2024, Memory Lane Inc. arranged for FedEx to deliver a package of 54 vintage baseball cards to a hotel in Strongsville, Ohio. The cards were sent there for safekeeping before they would be displayed at a sports card conference set to take place nearby.
However, when a Memory Lane representative turned up at the Best Western hotel to collect the package, it was…gone. It later turned out that Jacob Paxton, a member of the hotel’s staff, had stolen the cards and sent them to an accomplice’s residence.
Given that these baseball cards were collectively worth more than $2 million, they would have been a devastating loss. In the event, all but two of them were eventually recovered. Only a 1909 Ramly Walter Johnson card and a 1941 Ted Williams card remained unaccounted for.
What kinds of items do thieves really have their eyes on? Allow us to provide you with some crucial insight when you subscribe to the Crime+Investigation newsletter.
