Police: A Half-Million Dollar Pokémon Card Collection Heist Was Just Called In
Photo: Kotaku / Toby Walker
We’re an odd species, what with our predilection for shortage, even when that scarce merchandise is a chunk of cardboard with a cartoon drawn on it. So it’s that 62-year-old South Carolina resident Christopher Polydorou is alleged to have had his house damaged into, and his $500,000 Pokémon card assortment stolen.
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Polydorou isn’t simply somebody who dug out a gem mint assortment of playing cards from his attic and acquired fortunate. The insurance coverage dealer, as reported by The Smoking Gun, is a collector of many varieties of playing cards, and shops his collections in a temperature-controlled room inside his 6,800-square-foot house on the waterfront. The Pokémon playing cards sat alongside extra conventional cardboard compilations, like baseball, soccer and basketball playing cards, occupying a devoted room within the seven-bedroom lodging.
A Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office report from July 13 states that the division obtained a telephone name from Polydorou, claiming that “an unknown person entered his collection room and removed one and a half boxes of collectible Pokémon card [sic] valued at half a billion dollars.” Fortunately for Polydorou, and remaining scraps of sanity left on the planet, the “billion” was a mistake made by the officer, the precise worth of the stolen playing cards apparently amounting to half one million {dollars}. However, he additionally informed TSG that it was in truth three containers stolen, not one-and-a-half.
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Read More: The Top 12 Most Valuable Pokémon Cards In History
Polydorou went on to say that the one individuals who’d entered his “collectibles room” (which I desperately hope is provided with invisible laser beams) since October final 12 months have been some “men from a HVAC company” (air-con repairmen), employed by his 91-year-old mom.
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Speaking to The Smoking Gun, Polydorou defined that these have been sealed, unopened containers of over 20-year-old playing cards, together with “a valuable Japanese edition.” As such, they might after all include single playing cards price near the full estimated worth.
Recent years have seen the worth of Pokémon playing cards go a bit foolish, largely inflated by millionaire YouTubers not having sufficient actual issues of their lives, thus seeing the worth of particular playing cards rising exponentially. It’s clearly a bubble that may’t be sustained, not least as a result of it’s not a self-replenishing market (your new card immediately received’t be price $500,000 in 20 years time), however Polydorou’s assortment might have been certainly one of only a few remaining sealed containers of early playing cards that also have that potential worth.
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The Pokémon Company has additionally made a concentrated effort of late to handle the hypothesis market, reportedly taking care to print far more playing cards within the hopes of serving to curb the scarcity driving up the costs.