Pokemon Turns 30, and Card Shops Are Installing Riot Glass

Sometime before dawn this week, someone broke into a Pokemon card shop in west Houston, made off with roughly $10,000 in cards, and left the store dealing with the damage on top of the loss, according to FOX 26 Houston. Police are still looking for suspects. On its own, a single smash and grab in Texas might read as a local crime blotter item. Lined up against the rest of this year, it reads like a pattern.

A recent investigation from Teen Vogue counted dozens of Pokemon card stores and collectors broken into or robbed in just the first seven months of 2026 alone. The incidents follow a familiar shape: masked crews, sometimes armed, targeting the display cases holding a shop's most valuable cards rather than the register.

The clearest example happened in January at Trainer Court, a Pokemon card shop in Manhattan's Meatpacking District then still called Poke Court. Three masked robbers locked the door behind them, trapping dozens of customers inside during a community craft event, pointed a gun at staff and shoppers, and smashed the shop's glass display cases with hammers. They left with about $100,000 worth of Pokemon cards and sets, plus cash from the register and an employee's phone, according to NBC News reporting cited by Teen Vogue. The shop changed its name after Nintendo reached out following the robbery.

The pattern has repeated at conventions and in broad daylight. At Anime NYC in August, almost $10,000 worth of Pokemon cards were stolen from a vendor in the middle of the day at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, though an arrest was later made, per CBS News. In Los Angeles, armed robbers followed a card collector from a shop and took about $300,000 worth of cards stashed in a briefcase. The same weekend, a nearby shop was broken into with a chainsaw and lost at least $50,000 in cards, and a third store, PokeMall, was burglarized twice within two months of opening, according to NBC4 Los Angeles.

Smaller shops have not been spared either. In North Carolina in January, a lone robber pepper sprayed an employee, bound them with zip ties, and took more than $20,000 in cards before being arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In New Jersey in June, a father and son were robbed at gunpoint while loading their inventory after a trade show, losing $150,000 in cards and $12,000 in cash.

The trend is not confined to the United States. Two brothers in the United Kingdom pleaded guilty in March to a string of robberies totaling about 71,000 British pounds, roughly $96,000, in stolen Pokemon cards. In Japan, Tokyo police arrested two men in May over the theft of 34 million yen, around $213,000, worth of cards from a delivery van, and a shop in Niigata lost about 10 million yen, around $63,000, in cards after a break in that is still under investigation.

Cards are worth stealing now in a way they were not a few years ago. A first edition Blastoise that Beckett's 1999 price guide valued at $70 to $100 now sells ungraded for more than $1,500, and a top graded copy is valued at $78,000, according to data from the tracking app Collectr. Collectr's CEO, Adam Hijleh, told Teen Vogue that Pokemon cards now make up 65 percent of everything tracked on the app and that he expects the category to keep growing into 2027, helped along by the new sets tied to the franchise's 30th anniversary on September 16. That value growth has drawn law enforcement attention too. In May, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the ATF's New York field office announced the arrest of a man accused of orchestrating the Trainer Court robbery along with a second armed robbery at a Pokemon shop in Queens, and he faces up to 20 years in prison.

Shops that have already been hit are changing how they operate rather than waiting for the next one. Trainer Court now closes earlier in the day, dropped its highest end inventory from the sales floor entirely, and swapped in reinforced glass on its display cases and doors. "We have riot glass on our doors," owner Courtney Chin told Teen Vogue. For a hobby built on cardboard, that is not the kind of security spending anyone expected to need.