The thieves entered a San Jose business under cover of the night to execute their heist. They broke in, with one crawling along the floor to avoid detection, and began searching in the dark.
Within minutes, they made off with the goods – more than 35,000 Pokémon cards.
Tofu’s Trading, a Bay Area trading card store, captured the unusual break-in on surveillance footage as it unfolded around 2am local time on 24 January. The burglars left before police arrived.
“We saw like three people breaking in through our side door, which was kind of ridiculous because there’s a fridge blocking it – so I don’t think it was a targeted attack at all,” the store’s co-owner and manager, Amy Simpson, told ABC7.
“I don’t think they were in for hobby necessarily because they didn’t know what to take.”
The video captured by the store shows three people, with their faces covered, rummaging through the store. Tofu’s Trading poked fun at the incident and the thieves in surveillance footage edited to include sound effects and graphics that the store posted on Instagram.
The thieves made off with the cards as well as the cash register but missed a special collection of cards, released just once a year, that was set to be released by the store just two days later, Simpson said.
“Guys, we know you’re all excited about the releases this week,” Simpson said over video footage of the burglary, which showed someone crawling on the store’s floor. “But they release January 26 on Friday, not 2am on Wednesday.”
Tofu’s Trading estimates the stolen items are worth tens of thousands of dollars.
“We had to have some fun after a long stressful day of cleanup, inventory count, police report, insurance filing, and more,” the store said on Instagram in a post featuring the comical video. “They can take our products, but they can never take away our love of running a local hobby store in our community.”
