According to a report by Japanese weekly news magazine Shūkan Gendai, several crime syndicates in Japan have been using Pokémon TCG cards for the purposes of money laundering.

A former crime syndicate leader said that his organization used these Pokémon TCG cards as a mechanism by which stolen money could be transported abroad. Since the cards are relatively small,they are easy to smuggle. The cards would then be resold abroad; the profits would be converted to local currency.

By buying cards in cash and then selling them abroad, the criminals make it appear as though they made their money from genuine card pulls. Additionally, after they transfer the money made off these cards, they can use that money for ostensibly legitimate purposes because doing so directly with stolen money would be likely to raise suspicion on the part of the authorities.

To ensure that they obtain highly valuable cards from booster packs, these criminals make use of high-quality metal detectors which they then used on the booster packs. This is because the rarest Pokémon TCG cards all have holofoil and would thus set off the metal detector. These valuable cards are then sold at high prices while the unopened booster packs are sold as-is.

Many of these money-laundering schemes have, unbeknownst to the administrators of such websites, made their way onto leading Japanese online TCG auction sites and have often failed to be detected until much too late.

In other TCG-related news, check out Selection 5: Quarter Century Edition. Alternatively, you can also head over to the SNKRDUNK App via the banner below and find the top trending and latest single cards and boxes.

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