Nearly a million dollars in sports and Pokémon cards stolen from a FedEx truck in California

Thieves made off with nearly $1 million in sports, Pokémon and other trading cards swiped from a FedEx truck in Southern California last week, police said Monday.

Officers responded Tuesday to a trading card authentication company regarding the theft of cards worth an estimated $963,000 from a FedEx truck, Santa Ana police spokeswoman Natalie Garcia said by email. The theft included two pallets of cards and a third that was “disrupted,” she said.

The location of the report was Professional Sports Authenticator in the city of Santa Ana, about 33 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The company bills itself on its website as “the leading third-party authentication and rating service” and says it can sell customers’ cards online for a percentage of the sale price in order to “turn cards into currency.”

Nick Andrews, known on social media as Boston Card Hunter, said on X that there were several victims of the theft, one of whom he said lost $500,000 worth of cards.

Ultimately, he said, the heist could be one of the largest in trading card history.

He compiled a list of cards believed to have been stolen in the theft, which totaled 383 as of Monday evening. Among them, as video game news site IGN noted, were a Michael Jordan Upper Deck 23K Gold card from 1995 and a Simplified Chinese 1st Anniversary One Piece Nami set from 2024.

Card trader Sky-B, who said he wanted to be referred to only by that nickname, discussed the cards he said he lost in the theft in a YouTube video Monday.

“It’s 104 cards that I accumulated over two years,” he said. “There are a lot of irreplaceable cards here that I’ll never see again. And, honestly, that’s what hurts the most – aside from obviously being absolutely destroyed financially here.”

He said the missing cards were dropped off at Professional Sports Authenticator, where they were certified and began their journey back to him in Michigan before discovering they had been stolen.

Sky-B said it paid $8,000 in grading fees and lamented missing out on the likely increased value that grading added to its cards, which it said were insured for up to $156,000, below their likely market value.

A company spokesperson said in an email that the grading fees would be returned, along with the fair market value of the affected cards.

In a statement, the company said it was working with investigators and had deactivated the certificates for the stolen cards.

“We have deactivated the certificates of the stolen items and notified marketplace partners so they can be on the lookout for rare, serialized items,” a Professional Sports Authenticator spokesperson said.

FedEx said in a statement that it was essential to get to the bottom of the theft.

“The security of our customers’ shipments is a top priority and we are working with local law enforcement as they investigate,” the statement said.

Garcia, the police spokesman, said the value of stolen property could increase.

“This remains an open case,” she said, “and we have not made any arrests or recovered any stolen property.”

In 2024, a FedEx shipment of 54 vintage baseball cards worth $2.1 million was successfully delivered to a Best Western in Strongsville, Ohio, for a sports card conference, but it was stolen by a hotel employee who was sentenced to four to six years in prison, prosecutors in nearby Cleveland said.