Clueless Man Buys €3,000,000 Pokemon Cards Without Asking Experts – Gets Scammed
YouTuber Logan Paul bought a box of Pokémon cards for $3.5 million. In doing so, he made the grave mistake of not seeking the advice of wise Pokémon experts. This will now be his undoing. Because he’s been scammed. In the box weren’t even Pokémon cards, but “GI Joe” booster packs.
What did the man buy there? YouTuber Logan Paul purchased a box in December 2021, which he believed to be the “only sealed box full of first edition Pokémon cards.”
On December 20, he tweeted that this box was “authenticated,” meaning it’s genuine.
But he didn’t unpack this box, because then it would lose value. The box was sealed and certified “authentic” in 1998, he thought. From Logan Paul’s point of view, there was nothing to be done about it.
For Logan Paul, the $3.5 million was just a small step, he had already bought a box for $2 million in February 2021.
Here’s how the public reacted: There was a lot of attention for this purchase. His tweet alone received over 54,000 likes and 1,700 retweets.
Buying Logan Paul was proof that “old Pokémon cards” function as a store of value, like buying an expensive piece of art.
In Germany, too, there was a hype about “Pokémon cards”, driven by Twitch streamer Trymacs.
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Pokémon experts immediately doubt the authenticity of the box
How did the experts react? Wise Pokémon experts noted early on that this box could be a scam. The “Pokebeach” page, which is familiar with such things, already said on December 31, 2021: Something is fishy here (via pokebeach).
This is what the experts said:
- A YouTuber had already collected evidence 8 months earlier that cast doubt on the authenticity of the box.
- Strange things would have happened during an earlier sales process: user names were changed, the box was advertised in a dubious way and sold in the wrong way. Such a valuable collector’s item should actually be auctioned off via an auction house, not somehow online.
- Further irregularities were also noticed during the deeper research
- At the end of a first auction, the highest bid was a comparatively paltry $72,500 – clearly showing that “serious collectors” were not interested in the box that Logan Paul later bought
- The box was also authenticated by a company that doesn’t know enough about Pokémon cards because it specializes in baseball cards
- Pokébeach said you have to have trusted experts inspect the box to dispel any doubts about its authenticity
In any case, the history of the box’s origin was dubious: Supposedly someone had bought a house in Canada and found the box somewhere in the closet. In the Pokémon community, this is considered a “running gag” for a dubious origin story, similar to “fell off the truck”.
In general, the Pokémon experts seemed to be a little snuffy that such “non-serious” collectors like Logan Paul are now doing such things.
Logan Paul pulled the zonk
This is what came out now: After the doubts about the box increased, Logan Paul has now really unpacked the expensive package. And sure enough, instead of Pokemon First Edition cards, GI: Joe Booster Packs were in the expensive bundles.
If only he had listened to the experts.
Paul consoles himself with the fact that his video about the bad buy is now at least number 1 in the YouTube trends.
These Pokémon cards have caused grief more than once:
Opening of $375,000 insanely rare Pokemon cards ends in total disaster
Reference-mein-mmo.de