A fan was able to retrieve their stolen Pokémon card three years after it was originally nicked, ripped from its box on its way back from being professionally assessed at a card graders. The card was a shadowless Charizard, one of the most prized rarities in the entire hobby. Though it’s only the first editions that sell for the price of a car, a shadowless Charizard card can still be worth over $1,000.
The fan, who lives in New Jersey, and goes by the online handle Flopsies, said they didn’t believe it at first when their friend told them their Charizard was missing. They’d sent off three cards to BGS (Beckett Grading Services) together, Flopsie’s shadowless Charizard and banned Misty’s Tears, and the friend’s unlimited Charizard. But the box had come back empty.
“We’re notorious for joking around and I wouldn’t put it past him to joke like this,” he tells Wargamer. But when the friend followed up with the footage from his Ring doorbell, and began making support tickets with Beckett and FedEx, Flopsies began to see he was serious.
After the classic experience of discovering his childhood collection in his parents’ attic, Flopsies, then in his late 20s, had been hooked on the hobby. “It was all I could think about,” he says. “I felt like I was back in the 1990s, opening packs with my friends.” Finding he had shadowless versions of not just Charizard, but Venusaur as well, the renewed fan had big plans to buy a Blastoise and have highly collectable versions of ‘The Big 3’.
But when he learned his most valuable rare Pokémon card had been stolen, that love of the hobby was severely knocked. “All the wind had been taken out of my sails, because I didn’t want to buy any other people’s cards, I wanted mine displayed,” Flopsies says. “I immediately stopped the vigorous hunting for modern cards… didn’t want to send any other cards [to be graded], I was destroyed.”
Even though he was sure “any smart person would have cracked the slab and regraded it”, Flopsies still had the serial number from Beckett. So he shared it on Reddit, asking people to look out for the card. Still, he felt the odds of it coming to anything were one in a million.
Flopsies explains, “I kept the three serial numbers on a sticky note on my desktop, and every month or so I’d just search for them. I wasn’t in denial that I’d actually find it; it just really didn’t take me much time to look for them and I kept telling myself that crazier things have happened before.”
Flopsies was still doing this, close to three years after the theft, when finally his persistence paid off. He found his Charizard, being sold by an established eBay seller, who also had a brick and mortar store.
While his group chat of friends, who’d all joined in the hunt for the missing cards at some stage or another went wild, “my heart was pounding the entire time because I knew this was just the start of trying to obtain it with no guarantees of actually receiving it.”
It turns out that Flopsies was right to be apprehensive, because when he approached the store to attempt to get it back, the seller – despite apparently acknowledging it was a stolen card – asked him to buy it, at full price, for $1,500. “Most other reputable shops I have spoken to say step number one of buying a graded card is to look up the serial, so when it came up invalid, they should not have purchased it in my opinion,” Flopsies says.
“I wouldn’t have felt morally right demanding my card be returned for free,” he adds, but he had hoped for a significant discount.
Flopsies wrote about the incident on Reddit, and his (now-deleted) post blew up. And it seems like heat started getting back to the seller, because it wasn’t long before they reached out to him again, saying they were being “bombarded with emails and phone calls”. Eventually, Flopsies agreed to buy the card for $600, a little less than he’d received as an insurance payout for the theft. This would allow him to get the card re-graded, and cover shipping costs.
“I did not intend to cause the shop any damage,” Flopsies says, but adds that he’s “mostly positive the only reason the sellers agreed to change the price and work something out is because it got enough attention on Reddit.”
“The biggest takeaway honestly is going to sound cliché, but I couldn’t have done it without the Reddit community.”
Five days after his initial Reddit post, Flopsies made another. “She made it back home!”
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Source: Wargamer
