In August 2020, a 31-year-old man in the USA received $85,000 (about €77,895) in Covid relief, but used the money to buy a card from the trading card game Pokémon. Now, a court has sentenced him to a $10,000 (€9,164) fine and 36 months in federal prison. The card is gone as well. It was a bad investment anyway.
Why did the man receive so much money? As reported by the New York Times, the man from the state of Georgia claimed to run a small business for “entertainment services” and employed 10 staff. He estimated his revenue at about $235,000 (€215,000) over 12 months.
But as investigators later stated, there was no such business. The man had defrauded the money.
This is the penalty: The man pleaded guilty to the charges in October 2021 (via justice.gov):
He has now been sentenced:
- he must serve 3 years in a federal prison
- he must pay a fine of $10,000
- he must repay the full $85,000 in Covid relief he received
- after serving his sentence, he will be on supervised release for another 3 years
This is what happens to the card: To pay his penalty, he forfeited the Pokémon card he had previously purchased. It is now being auctioned by the authorities; the money will go back into the fund.
For the authorities, the discovery of such a card was a new scenario. Normally, gold bars, yachts, or luxury cars are seized in such fraud cases, but not Pokémon cards. They were therefore unable to assess the value and first needed to find an expert to determine the value of the card, as a prosecutor told the Times.
Bought the wrong card when the market was at its highest prices
What kind of card was it? The man purchased a collectible card of Pokémon Charizard in the shiny version of the first edition for around $58,000 (approximately €53,000). According to a Pokémon expert, this is the most sought-after card in Pokémon.
However, the card wasn’t perfect. It received a rating of 9.5 out of 10 possible points. Such collectible cards are rated based on their condition. A 10 is like “fresh out of the pack, perfect”, a 9.5 shows minimal signs of wear.
Therefore, the card was overpriced at €53,000, as the expert explains. Only the “perfect 10s” are truly valuable because they are so rare. A mint card of a shiny Charizard can fetch over $300,000 at auction – the card the fraudster acquired was overpriced for that amount.
As the Pokémon expert says, the man bought the card when prices for cards were skyrocketing, but the market has since cooled significantly. If someone were to ask him, he would advise the government to hold onto the card for now and wait for higher prices.
Rich YouTubers have already had experiences with buying fake cards:
Clueless man buys Pokémon cards for €3,000,000, without asking an expert – Gets scammed
