$200k+ worth of Pokemon cards stolen

As the price of rare collectible trading cards has soared in recent years, a small game and card shop in Forest Lake, Minnesota was robbed of $250,000 worth of Pokemon cards in the middle of the night.

According to KARE 11, prior to the robbery the self-described ‘mom and pop store’ Punch Out Gaming saw increased demand for Pokemon merchandise, and particularly trading cards, the rarest of which have recently been going at auction for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The surge in popularity of these cards, as well as the high prices they can fetch online is presumably what prompted the robbery which occurred on February 10, when a man broke through a sidewall in the back of the Punch Out Gaming store after breaking into a neighboring building. The man was caught on surveillance cameras entering the store through a small hole and reportedly spent nearly two hours collecting all the Pokemon cards and merchandise in the shop’s storage area as he managed to avoid tripping any alarms.

The store's Facebook post claims that the thief stole over $200 thousand dollars worth of merchandise, while the store owners told FOX 9 that their potential loss could be over $250 thousand.

One of the store’s owners says it was heartbreaking to watch the burglar steal everything he had spent years building up, while another co-owner says he believes there were several people involved in the heist, as the amount of boxes they stole would be impossible to move out single handedly.

“I realized how much money, product, and time we put into it, and I just started crying … I can’t recover this product because our distributors don’t have any. So, even with the insurance money, that doesn’t do us any good,” explained Eric Johnson, one of the store’s co-owners.

The local community has offered their support to the store owners, who have run the Punch Out Gaming store for nearly a decade. People online have also vowed to keep an eye out for any postings of stolen cards or merchandise and promised to notify authorities if anything suspicious comes up.

Although the security camera footage provides a fairly clear image of the perpetrator, authorities have yet to identify the suspect and the store owners have also said that they do not recognize the burglar.