More than $113,000 worth of rare Pokémon cards have been stolen from a Massachusetts shop, according to the store’s owners.
Officers responded to a reported break-in at 1st Edition Collectibles, a trading card shop in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on Tuesday. The break-in reportedly happened around 2.30am and the thief stole a handful of Pokémon cards including five to seven rare cards and a few vintage boxes.
Some of the cards stolen included the BGS 8.5 Skyridge Crystal Charizard and BGS 7.5 1st Edition Shadowless Blastoise, the owners of the store said in a Facebook post.
A screengrab of store surveillance footage posted online showed an individual hooded and masked, crouched over a large glass display case. In total, the thief stole $113,650 worth of trading cards, NBC Boston reports.
As of Friday morning, no arrests have been made.
Following the robbery, the store owners closed up shop for the week in an effort to take time to “reflect, regroup, revamp and come back even better”. They wrote on Facebook that they “appreciate the community support we’ve received, it truly means so much to us to see you all come together to spread awareness and keep an eye out for the stolen items”.
One of the store owners, Felipe Andre, told NBC Boston: “We’re literally just three guys … This is our passion. This is what we love, since we were children.”
“He actually broke into the back courtyard of our building, smashed the window in the back door of the lobby, and then smashed the back window of our door,” Andre added to NBC 10.
“Came in, he knew exactly the items he was taking. We don’t display pricing in the store at all. So, the value of cards, it’s a market like anything else worth what people are willing to pay for them. So, it’s all typically auction or recorded sales of those items, either of similar or the same grade.”
Andre continued: “These are all from sets that are no longer in print ranging from the years about 2000 to 2006. One of them is considered the ‘crown jewel’ of the entire Pokémon … the first edition-based set Charizard.”
Despite the robbery, Andre said there is a way to track the cards.
“Whenever you send a card to get graded, no matter which grading service, they serialize every single card, so we have all of our information on our Instagram and Facebook with photos of the cards themselves … So they’re all serialized, so if anyone sees that certificate number, they’ll know exactly where it came from, and who it belongs to,” he told NBC 10.
Last year, thieves in San Jose, California, broke into a trading card store and stole more than 35,000 Pokémon cards.