Armed robbers steal $100,000 worth of Pokéstock from New York City Pokémon store

Pokémon games may not come to PC very often, but it's still the highest-grossing media franchise in the world and, therefore, serious business. Serious enough to pull a gun in the middle of a store, apparently, as NBC reported happening during a robbery in Manhattan on January 14.

No one was hurt, fortunately, but the trio of robbers brandished handguns and smashed open several display cases full of merchandise at the Poké Court on 13th Street. They stole what store owner Courtney Chin estimates is $100,000 in merchandise. The thieves remain at large.

Now, I know what you're thinking. This crime, though unfortunate, is sort of novel and maybe even a little funny because a Pokémon store was robbed and not a bank or an art museum. That's why you're reading it on PC Gamer, after all. Typically, the only heists we cover involve Payday 3 or the latest crypto nonsense⁠—who the heck steals Pokémon merch at gunpoint? But a brief trip down the rabbit hole informed me that this Pokéheist is embarrassingly mundane.

Earlier this month, a similar robbery in Los Angeles involving the creature collector netted some armed thieves triple the payday of the above case. The same weekend, another robbery took place in Simi Valley. In Dec. 2025, a different trading card store in Burbank was robbed. A month before that, a San Diego store was broken into at night. Reader, let me make my stance clear: you do not, under any circumstances, gotta catch 'em all. Not like this, at least.

It's easy to see why this sort of thing happens. As you might have gleaned from the six-figure labels attached to these crimes, rare and valuable trading cards tend to fetch outsized prices from collectors. That's why there's Magic card worth a million bucks, some guy just got $30,000 for trading in a Gengar to Gamestop, and a mad lad called the Kabuto King is on a journey to hoard every first edition of one of the game's oldest fossil Pokémon. You might think that doesn't make any of this less stupid, and my brief research on this topic indicates that you'd be right.