62-year-old’s $500,000 Pokemon card collection stolen

Police in South Carolina are looking into a massive Pokemon card theft that saw $500,000 worth of cards stolen from a 62-year-old man’s house.

Pokemon cards have become quite lucrative in recent years with some selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on their rarity and condition.

As such, we’ve seen many Pokemon card-related thefts over the years, but no crime has resulted in such a haul as the collection reportedly stolen from a man’s house earlier this month.

According to The Smoking Gun, 62-year-old insurance broker Christopher Polydorou’s twenty-year-old collection valued at half-a-million dollars went missing and police are on the case.

Police investigating after $500K Pokemon card collection stolen

On July 15, a police report was filed stating that an unknown person entered his collection room in his 6800-square-foot waterfront home and stole boxes of Pokemon cards.

Polydorou says the only people who have entered this room were workers for a HVAC company. He also keeps baseball, football, and basketball cards in there, but it seems like only Pokemon cards were stolen.

Speaking to The Smoking Gun, Polydorou said that some unopened boxes held 24 packs of cards and one contained valuable Japanese editions.

The collector added that his evaluation of the value of his cards came from recent auctions for first-edition boxes issued in 1999.

As such, it’s possible that one of the unopened packs could contain a Charizard 1st Edition Shadowless Base Set, which can sell for as much as $420,000 by itself.

This is hardly the first time that a big collection of Pokemon cards have been stolen. Earlier in 2022, a man smashed through the wall of a Minnesota gaming store to snatch $250,000 worth of Pokemon products.