JUST BEFORE THE 2023 Gen Con gaming extravaganza opened at the Indiana Convention Center, two New Yorkers carried out an odd crime.
Thomas Dunbar and Andrew Giaume—who were known in the gaming community and had attended Gen Con as buyers for years—slipped into the vendor area and used a pallet jack to stroll out with boxes full of brand new packs of trading cards. Then they loaded the booty into a rented vehicle and headed back East.
This was no penny-ante theft: The cards were later valued at $300,000.
The brash act was not an isolated incident. As cards for games like Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering grow more coveted, theft is becoming a headache for game store owners, collectors, and convention organizers.
In 2024, burglars broke into Tofu’s Trading in San Jose, California, and escaped with more than 35,000 Pokémon cards valued at $1 to several hundred dollars apiece. Then a Texas store reported the loss of more than $100,000 worth of vintage Pokémon cards during an overnight break-in. And in Los Angeles this past spring, thieves smashed display cases and ran off with rare Pokémon and One Piece cards. Similar incidents have been reported from Australia to the UK.
Why trading cards? They’re almost impossible to trace, and, being small and light, are far easier to boost than, say, cars or art. And the payoff can be substantial. A typical Pokémon booster pack sells for around $6, but elite specimens have recently fetched astonishing sums. YouTuber Logan Paul purchased a 1998 Japanese CoroCoro Comic Pikachu Illustrator card for $5.28 million in 2021. He resold it earlier this year for $16.49 million. That’s the extreme upper end of the market, but it’s easy to see why criminals target the cards.
How did a black market develop for small rectangles of cardboard? Chalk it up to what economists call the “subjective theory of value.” It holds that the price of everything, from a diamond ring, to a bottle of perfume, to a tub of hummus, isn’t determined by objective standards but by what people are willing to pay for it. The first comic book featuring Superman sold for millions. As for game cards, plenty of well-heeled 40-ish people who want to reclaim a piece of their childhoods have decided they’re valuable, so they are.
Not surprisingly, Pokémon—which happens to turn 30 this year—sets the standard. “There’s just more demand for those,” says Bob Orr, owner of Greenwood store Ye Gamer’s Guild. “A lot of people grew up with it. There’s a nostalgia factor. And now they’re older and have the disposable income to buy them.”
Orr and other game shop operators typically have tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory on hand at any given time—goods that, in theory, can easily be carried out unseen. And that doesn’t even count the cards that the throngs who attend the stores’ game nights haul in. While local owners don’t necessarily believe the theft issue is getting worse, it is a concern. “I know I’ve always heard game store owners talk about it,” Orr says.
Thefts are big news these days mostly because of greater visibility. If a thief broke into a store a few decades ago, the news rarely traveled beyond the immediate area. “With social media, if something happens, everyone knows,” Orr notes.
Craig Casares, manager of Good Games in downtown Indianapolis, says he’s dealt with two significant thefts over the years, one of which was resolved in a couple of hours and the other in about a week. Most local cases have involved the random theft of one or two high-value cards, not the sort of smash-and-grab operations we’ve seen so much of elsewhere lately, during which teams of thieves rush a store after hours and cart out thousands of cards. That, admittedly, is a nightmare scenario for local retailers. “I do think it’s a big issue because it’s something that smaller shops could potentially not recover from,” Orr says. “That’s someone’s livelihood.” A smash-and-grab hasn’t happened in Indianapolis—so far.
Collectibles shop owners aren’t the only ones on edge. Casares says the average game card aficionado’s biggest fear is someone making off with a prized tournament deck they’ve built over many years. Those decks are often kept in easily pilfered backpacks when players gather for public tournaments or game nights. “The average worry is along the lines of [the loss of] a legacy deck that might be worth $10,000,” Casares says.
Competitive players have taken to sticking Tile trackers in their backpacks. (Although if the perpetrator thinks to look for one, it’s not hard to remove.) The gaming community itself has morphed into an informal security network. “What we do here is we try to have a good rapport with all of our fellow game stores in the area,” Casares says. “If for some reason someone comes to us or we find out that a card from our inventory has disappeared, we immediately put the word out to the other stores.”
That sense of community may explain why our city’s annual Gen Con, in town this month, has stayed safer than one might expect after 2023’s notable incident. It would seem to be the perfect place for bad actors: enormous crowds, millions of dollars in merchandise, and enough churn to conceal their deeds. Yet both Gen Con officials and local retailers describe a different culture. “Most of the people who go, they’re here on a weekly basis or at their local game store regularly. They’re not typically people who are going to try and grab something,” Casares insists. Indeed, players who accidentally leave with a game containing someone else’s card usually return it as soon as they realize. “The honor system is alive and well,” Casares says.
Technology also helps. While Dunbar and Giaume operated with Oceans Eleven precision, they didn’t notice they were being monitored. Cops got footage of them loading their cart and then packing the boxes into their car. In one shot, a graphic on the shirt one of the men was wearing was identifiable, which was their undoing.
According to Jackie Martin, Gen Con marketing director, better coordination between law enforcement and convention center officials is in place today. “Since [the 2023 theft], no repeat incidents have been reported, thanks to upgrades in security protocols at the Indiana Convention Center.”
Three years later, the Gen Con robbery is part of the convention’s lore, but fear of it happening again is distant. Stealing cards may seem easy. But thanks to organizers’ thoughtful planning and the supportive nature of the gaming community, getting away with it is considerably harder.
