update on this: I’m flying to Chicago this weekend to verify the case with BBCE, the company who insured its authenticity
to be continued… https://t.co/grLMa92JCM
— Logan Paul (@LoganPaul) January 5, 2022
Three and a half million dollars is a lot of money to pay for cartoon trading cards. Even if they’re authentic, super rare, first edition, or any of that stuff. But imagine splashing $3.5 million on that sh*t and it turns out they aren’t even real??
Well, according to Vice, that’s the predicament Logan Paul potentially finds himself in. Last month, big Pokémon fan Logan was very excited to acquire a case of six First Edition Base Set Pokémon card booster boxes for $3.5 million. It was basically a holy grail-type purchase: for years, the Pokémon community wondered if any unopened cases like this even still existed!
According to an investigation by Pokémon fan news site PokeBeach, there are several clues that the set might be inauthentic. The case originally popped up on eBay in March 2021, when the Pokémon card market was white hot. And yet, the seller, number1pokemonmaster, chose to sell on eBay rather than Sothebys or some other highly reputable auction house (eBay is fine, but it’s rare for a collectible worth literally millions of dollars to be sold there).
Not to mention the seller had questionable feedback history, and other dodgy going-ons…
number1pokemonmaster had very little feedback, and their account is seemingly no longer active at all. The seller had three different stories for where he got the cards: from an old woman’s estate sale in Canada, for his 12th birthday, and abandoned in an attic. The box originally sold to the highest bidder for $72,500, but the deal fell through when the seller refused to allow the buyer to inspect the cards themselves. And the box was authenticated by a company called Baseball Card Exchange, which doesn’t have expertise in Pokemon cards.
Jesus. I know Logan Paul is richer than the Queen, but if you’re coughing up $3.5 million for Pokémon cards, surely the least you can do is check the seller’s feedback history, or verify the authenticity of the item somehow. Or how about taking a closer look at the serial numbers?
Maybe the most damning evidence presented by PokeBeach was that the barcode on the box doesn’t match the printed product code. The label also isn’t faded, as labels made in the 90s from the card maker Wizards of the Coast typically are.
Oh dear. That wasn’t even the biggest red flag, either…
The fact that it was even on eBay at all was suspicious—selling such a valuable item outside of an auction house, and then mailing it to the buyer for $30 via Canada Post, were other red flags.
I don’t want to call Logan Paul an idiot because he’s already more successful than anyone reading this blog can hope to be in their entire lifetimes but still, shocking he would allow himself to be scammed this badly. Then again, doesn’t he have an accountant or advisor to look into this sort of thing for him? If so, I think someone’s about to get the pink slip. Fair play to whoever the scammer is, though. Huge W for them.
For an actually sick Game Boy custom table top that Logan Paul created himself, click HERE.
