California man Mohammad Asif, 36, was arrested Thursday and charged with burglary and other crimes after a woman reported that her phone was taken from her at gunpoint—and Pokémon cards soon robbed from her boyfriend's home, along with other valuables.
WTOP report the robbery, burglary and arrest happening in quick succession..
A short time later, the woman's boyfriend arrived to where the robbery happened and shortly after received an alert from his home security system that there was a burglary in progress at his home in the 4500 block of Plateau Drive in Fair Oaks. Police said several high value items, including Pokémon cards, were taken. After an investigation, police said they identified Asif as a suspect.
Pokémon theft and fraud is a growth market in America's otherwise declining crime business.
A Massachusetts man, Richard Jovahn Nunes, was recently arrested and charged with stealing more than $100,000 worth of Pokémon cards and collectibles from a shop in a smash-and-grab. Surveillance footage shows a man smashing through a glass door to gain entry. Among the purloined items was a "Neo Revelation" Pokémon box, apparently worth $30,000 to people who are into that sort of thing.
Richard Jovahn Nunes was arrested after two different people reported a man trying to sell rare Pokémon cards, including a box worth $30,000 — the same box was among the rare and graded trading cards stolen from 1st Edition Collectibles in New Bedford on July 8, local police announced Wednesday. Investigators found it was very unlikely that the attempted sales wouldn't be connected to the original theft, and tracked down Nunes, a 24-year-old, in Taunton, according to police. Investigators then found multiple high-value cards, including four of the Pokémon Charizard, at a Dartmouth residence where they believe Nunes had been staying.
In Florida, a thief stole $25,000 worth of Pokemon cards from a store in DeLand.
The owners shared a three-minute video of surveillance footage on Facebook, showing a masked person shattering the store's front door and ducking through the broken glass with a large container. The person is then seen going behind the counter within seconds to steal what appears to be cards on display. "Most of these shelves contained higher value Pokémon cards," Gem Mint Cards owner Christen Wybo told News 6. "A lot of them are graded cards so the top rated most expensive cards and then a lot of our cards we used for players who want to build decks."
In Minnesota, a good old-fashioned heist took place in 2023: two men were charged with stealing a quarter-million dollars worth of Pokémon cards after allegedly cutting a hole into a gaming store from a neighboring business.
Some thefts, though, don't require any breaking-in or burglary: factory workers were suspected of swiping valuable cards right out of the presses.
This weekend, Pokemon's biggest ever factory theft came to light on social media. A photo began circulating of thousands of Fusion Strike secret rare cards that were stolen from a factory in 2021. The photo actually leaked from an internal investigation that started in September 2021 and concluded in January 2022. However, fans just learned about it. The stolen Fusion Strike cards bounced between a few hands before ultimately being offered to a hobby store in Texas named Trading Card World. "[We were] approached by an individual inquiring if we were interested in purchasing hits from the set," the store told PokeBeach. When they saw the seller was offering thousands of the set's rarest cards, they realized it would be impossible for an ordinary consumer to obtain such a concentrated amount of them.
