The Pokemon TCG craze continues as fans seem to be scrambling to get cards from various promotional deals. As part of Pokemon's 25th anniversary, The Pokemon Company has been promoting its product through celebrities like Post Malone and Katy Perry, and has also partnered with fast food powerhouse McDonald's to add Pokemon cards into Happy Meals. A recent partnership with General Mills made it possible for Pokemon cards to be found in select cereal boxes, but as seen with the McDonald's promotion, scalpers are making them tough to get.

Following the announcement of the McDonald's promotion in the US, fans quickly realized getting their hands on the promotional cards might be harder than expected. Scalpers were buying up cards straight from stores without purchasing Happy Meals and selling them for inflated prices on eBay. Now that the McDonald's promotion is moving to the UK, UK restaurants have announced they will be restricting Happy Meal toy sales to combat scalping. Unfortunately, the same pattern of scalpers obtaining cards without buying product is occurring once again with the General Mills cereal promotion.

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The Pokemon and General Mills promotion makes it so select cereal brand boxes such as Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Cocoa Puffs have three free Pokemon cards inside them. There are 14 total cards in the collection, and each booster pack contains at least one holographic Pikachu with the Pokemon 25th Anniversary logo on it. Even though there are a large amount of cereal boxes with cards inside of them, there are numerous reports of scalpers hoarding cards. One common way is simply to rip open box after box and take the cards right out of them.

Other scalpers are apparently going so far as to buy pallets of cereal boxes just so they can get the cards from them. In some cases all the cereal boxes are left to waste, and store owners are having to figure out what to do with them. Many stores have resorted to placing electronic locks on cereal boxes to deter scalpers and reduce wasted product. While individual Pokemon cards like these are realistically only worth a few dollars, General Mills promotional cards are being advertised on sites like eBay for hundreds of dollars - with the holographic Pikachu boasting the highest asking prices.

The Pokemon TCG and General Mills promotion won't continue forever, and many fans are upset that when they have a chance to try and buy the select cereals, most of the boxes have already been opened. So far General Mills has not made any statements concerning the scalping of cards from its cereal boxes, and it seems like stores will continue to have problems until the promotion ends unless they can take steps to fight Pokemon card scalpers.

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