Pokemon cards were first released in 1996 and remain big business today. While the competitive side of this card game does remain popular, it’s the collecting side where things have really ramped up. The trading and swapping of Pokemon cards bolstered continues as strong as ever. Now the rarest of cards can be sold individually for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With price tags this big for items so seemingly able to be replicated, it’s no wonder that fakes have become a scourge on serious collectors of Pokemon cards. Forgeries have meant The Pokemon Company has had to increase the intricacies of authentication marks on each card. Also, sites like eBay have had to introduce authentication for sellers of Pokemon cards.
It is hard to crack down on physical stores, however. Wherever booster packs are sold for the game, stores may set out individual rarer cards for sale. This is what happened recently in the Mie prefecture of Japan, where a retro game store owner was arrested for sale of a ¥2,200 (around $20) Pokemon card in December 2021. He also allegedly had for sale a fake copy of Mega Man, named Rockman in Japan.
The 48-year-old owner, Yukinori Harada, admitted to police upon his arrest that he thought the card might have been fake when he sold it. Police also confiscated 150 other collectable cards and video games that were suspected of being fake. Mr Harada was charged with copyright violation, but his arrest was more likely over the amount of time he’d been suspected of selling forgeries, rather than the sale of one $20 card. The store itself, Alive Yokkaichi Tokiwa, has pledged to remain open in a tweet sent out apologizing for the “inconvenience.”
This is only the latest example of a recent trend of fans being caught out by fake Pokemon cards. Luckily for both the customer and the forger in this case, this sale came with a much smaller price tag than other recent scams. YouTuber Logan Paul was recently put out $3.5 million on a box of first edition Pokemon cards that turned out to be GI Joe cards.
It is very difficult to run a physical game store today, especially one that limits itself to only retro gaming. But resorting to selling forgeries would only harm a store in the long run, even without the police involved. Not only would it lose the business of any person that bought the fake there, but the reputation of the store would be irreversibly damaged.
Source: Nintendo Life