It was raining when the thieves struck.
The trio broke the glass of the side door at Tofu’s Trading and made out for the goods. They left with more than 35,000 Pokémon cards.
“It was kind of laid on a golden platter,” Amy Simpson, who owns the San Jose store, told The Washington Post.
The crime happened during a 10-minute span about 2 a.m. on Jan. 24. A week later, Simpson said no one had caught them all.
But she and her partner’s humor amid tragedy became a viral moment. She said he edited surveillance footage of the theft to poke fun at the criminals, showing them crawling around the floor and knocking over a fake plant with sounds and icons laid over the video.
The thought was simple, she said: “How can we spin this in a way that’s in a positive light?”
The crew took a trash can from the store and grabbed trays of cards, along with the register, from behind the counter. The big score was a dolly loaded with merchandise in the play room. They threw a tablecloth over the cards before wheeling them away into the rainy night.
Simpson said she and her partner found out when a neighbor called them the next morning to say something was wrong: There was broken glass and Pokémon cards everywhere.
They started the business in 2020 during the height of the covid lockdowns as a way to get cards and make money. Simpson said her partner was always into Pokémon, and then she got hooked on the rush of opening up a pack to see what was inside.
Simpson said they are still tallying the cost of what was stolen for the insurance report, but the cards taken range in value from a couple of cents to a few hundred dollars each.
They were part of the international Pokémon boom that came during the height of pandemic lockdowns, partially fueled by the need for a feel-good activity during isolation and by people digging up their old binders of cards to cash in with collectors and card graders.
And money attracts criminals, as seen by the spate of recent reports of Pokémon card thefts not only at card stores like Simpson’s but also at Target and from the company itself.
Simpson said the timing of the crime was fortunate; there were a ton of high-end collections being released Friday.
“It’s like a blessing in disguise, per se,” she said. “Per se.”
Anyone with information about the crime can call the San Jose Police Department at 408-277-8911.