They come for the Pokémon cards.
Around once a fortnight, thieves – with faces covered under hooded jumpers – smash their way into a hobby store in the middle of the night, ransack cabinets and displays and leave with wheelie bins filled with loot, according to shop owners.
The value of the allegedly stolen collections of cards – and all those Pikachus, Charizards and Squirtles – is estimated by some owners as between $20,000 and $100,000 per robbery – with the total potentially reaching $1m.
The spate of brazen robberies of Melbourne stores for the lucrative Pokémon collector cards has led store owners to call for police to treat the threat very seriously.
Stores in Greensborough, Camberwell and Thomastown are among those alleged to have been hit by a group of thieves, with about 16 robberies of card stores reported in the past eight months. More than half a dozen stores were allegedly targeted in the past two weeks alone, with Guardian Australia aware of an incident as recent as Friday.
So far, no arrests have been made or charges laid.
Victoria police confirmed there is an ongoing investigation into a series of alleged burglaries at card and collectible stores, but would not comment further on the matters raised by the store owners.
Blacklist Cards is on the second floor of a retail space in Thomastown, north of Melbourne’s CBD. Allegedly, at about 5am on 3 February, thieves had to break through an entrance door and use a crowbar on a roller door to get inside.
“They’ve just come in, smashed the glass cabinets, taken everything out of there,” said the store’s owner Umit Berkant. “The card wall that we had on there – [they have] broken the lock and smashed it down, and just ransacked everything.”
It “just comes to the point where they’ll do anything”, he said.
“They don’t care. We’ve got cafes next door, we’ve got the road – we’re on a main street where people will be driving past – and that’s the thing that gets to me,” he said.
“It’s quite shocking, to be quite honest with you, there’s no other word to really use. It’s just insane how little they really care about the scenario or the situation.”
Pokémon collector cards have been around for nearly as long as the eponymous Japanese video game and television series. Fans want to collect them all, buying cards featuring iconic Pokémon creatures such as Pikachu, Squirtle, Charizard and MewTwo.
The cards are sold new in big retail outlets such as Kmart, EB Games and JB Hi-Fi, as well as in the smaller independent stores that are being robbed.
Some of the rarer cards can sell for up to $500 each, while the rarest, dating back to the 1990s, can sell for millions. In 2022, YouTube influencer Logan Paul set a Guiness world record after buying a coveted PSA grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card for US$5.25m (A$8.3m).
Store owners have said rarer cards that have been removed from their packaging could be tracked down based on previous ownership, but the stolen packets of cards were harder to trace.
The cards have been in strong demand, according to the chief executive of General Games in Ketsbrough, Ryan Street. Street said thieves would likely know how much money they could make selling stolen stock.
“The demand for Pokémon product and collectible TCGs [trading card games] overseas is huge, just as much as it is here in Australia. The stock is very limited at the moment because it is so popular; suppliers can’t keep up,” he said.
Street said others in his industry had told him they were getting frustrated, considering the continuing brazen attacks.
“It’s having a big impact on the industry, with some stores now deciding they don’t want to sell Pokémon cards”.
Street said some stores were considering closing because they were afraid they woujld be robbed.
“From a mental health point of view, as a store owner you wake up in the morning going: ‘Is it our turn today?’
“There’s a little bit of frustration, I suppose, from us as an industry that not more has been done. We feel if this was about jewellery stores and they were getting hit multiple times across Melbourne, perhaps police would put a taskforce together.”
Street said police had advised owners to increase their security. In some instances, he said, staff were staying back late in the stores, and some were even sleeping in their store to prevent robberies.
Berkant urged the public to support the independent stores to get back on their feet.
“Now, more than ever, we need people to support their local game shops if they enjoy collecting cards, if they enjoy buying figurines, if they enjoy playing board games,” he said.
“We are struggling. And we are the small businesses. We don’t have large chains around Australia where we can mitigate that and put it somewhere else. This is our livelihood.”
