Say what you will about Logan Paul, but the man knows how to grab a headline. If he isn’t challenging some of the best fighters in the world to boxing matches, he’s spending a very literal fortune on Pokémon cards. When it comes to these pricey purchases, does Logan Paul have more money than sense?
Internet sleuths at TCG website Pokébeach looking into Paul’s recent acquisition believe that he may have fallen for a huge scam.
Back in December, Paul announced that he’d made a personal purchase. A sealed and allegedly authenticated box of six First Edition Gen 1 Pokémon booster boxes. To the tune of a whopping $3.5 million, this was the most expensive Pokémon purchase in history. These cards, first released in 1999, were where it all started. I remember grabbing a pack on my way home from school as a kid, royal blue metallic packaging with a snarling Venusaur or Blastoise leering out. There aren’t many unopened boxes out there in the world. A sealed bulk box of six whole booster boxes? It’s unlikely there’s any additional packs like this left, and that’s what Paul believed when he announced he’d made the purchase.
An almost inconceivable white whale to any serious trading card collector, when an item like this shows up, it of course comes under scrutiny for authenticity. The information revealed was to say the least, extremely sketchy. The high value item was first sighted on Canadian eBay, sold by a seller with no prior history of sales, and a sales page filled with errors. It sold from there in March 2021, for a little over $70,000 USD. That’s a suspiciously low price to put it mildly, especially considering this was at the height of the resurgent Pokémon card craze.
When the seller refused to allow the buyer to buy the item in person, alarm bells obviously rang, and the buyer backed out.
Even stranger, the seller appears to have provided different origins behind their acquisitions of the box. When it eventually sold again, the new buyer claimed to have had the box verified by the Baseball Card Exchange, a company that is not known to have any special experience or qualifications in authentication of Pokémon cards.
The verification was done in private, which is another clear red flag, but somehow on the strength of that dubious verification the buyer, sold the the box for a cool $2.7 million. The box would then pass from those hands into the grubby mitts of Logan Paul.
Quite the profit seen in a very short time on a box of dubious authenticity! Pokébeach continues to explore the questionable origins of the box in far greater detail in an extensive thread on the subject.
Paul now claims to be traveling this week to speak with the original company that oversaw the authentication of the box.
Did Paul really waste $3.5 mil on an apparently obvious scam? Only time will tell. All I know for sure if that I’m checking twice the next time I spend so much as tree-fiddy on a card at the next convention.
