How I Ran A Successful Pokemon Card Scam in Freshman Year
When I was in the ninth grade, I was absolutely in love with Pokémon cards. I collected them, traded them, and sold them. I loved the hustle involved in every aspect of it. Soon it became another trend and emerged as a new form of currency for the children who lived in my area. I felt like a real businessman. But, sadly none of us knew that Pokémon didn’t officially sell cards in India. And therefore, most of the cards that were in circulation were rip-offs. With time the news started to spread that most of the cards involved in circulation weren’t original cards but were cheap knock-offs made somewhere in China.
Within a month of this news seeping in, the collectors and traders started learning more and more about testing a card’s authenticity. Surprisingly, in no time we were able to find a way around it and made a system to find out whether a card was a knockoff. This system included checking the saturation of the colours on the cards, their thickness, and the size of the text on the cards. Despite most people having this knowledge barely anyone wanted to trade cards based on this information. At the end of the day, most of these people just wanted them because they looked cool and not because of their market value, and out of the few that wanted it for its market value most of them were victims of wishful thinking.
I knew why I collected cards, and it was not because they looked cool. It was because I loved how it kept fuelling my body with adrenaline. The excitement of trading something for something more valuable was a feeling I loved and wanted to keep going. But sadly, I didn’t have the money to buy original Pokémon cards that were imported from the US or Japan to keep trading. This was when I understood that I had to go ahead and start trading with the two groups of people I had mentioned in the paragraph above — The people who collected cards because they thought they were cool and those who were victims to wishful thinking.
The process of getting rid of my fake cards and exchanging them for something with much higher value was not very easy as I had to give away many cards that I had an emotional connection with for the very few original cards that people had. In a while, I ran out of all the cool-looking fake cards I had and didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was staring at a gold mine but didn’t have the equipment to mine it. But this desperation led me to give up all my morals and start manipulating the cards I had and turn them into whichever card I wished. Without wasting any time, I learnt how to change the writing on a card using a printer and turn it into a very sought-after card. With this new knowledge of reprinting cards, I was sweeping high-value Pokémon cards left and right and surprisingly without any guilt.
My best friend, Lohith too wanted in on the action but I didn’t tell him that I was trading fake cards for real ones because it would increase the risk of me getting caught. One day while I was trading cards, he saw a ‘G-Booster’ card in my hand which he had been wanting in his collection for longer than I could remember but I didn’t want to sell it to him because it was from the fake set I had printed on my own. Despite my efforts, he kept barging in on my trades and kept bumping up the offer to the point where nobody could even compete.
At this point, it would have seemed fishy if I hadn’t traded the card with Lohith, and the more I resisted the fishier it got. So, I traded the card with him. He fell into the fox pit. I couldn’t let my friend keep the card with him especially after accepting the items he gave me for the trade. I experienced feeling guilty after a long time and the only way I could be rid of the feeling was to tell him the truth about how I made and sold fake cards using my printer. It was hard but I still went ahead and told him about it.
Lohith was very mad at me after I told him about my operation. But, got better when I told him that I was never going to continue doing from henceforth. At least that was what I thought would happen, but when I told him about it, he wasn’t able to process that it was a fake card I had given him and even went on to accuse me of only learning the true value of the card after trading it with him. He was so enveloped in his delusional success that every truth that came out of my mouth regarding the card was interpreted by him as nothing but lies. I tried to point out at mistakes I made while printing the card to convince him that it was a fake. But he didn’t budge and was completely consumed by the feeling of earning something. To relieve my guilt a little I tried to give him back the items he had given me in the trade but he didn’t accept it because he thought it was some sort of ploy to get the card back.
It was only then that I understood that whenever I was lying to people about a card’s realness, I was so good at it that it became real to their closed minds. A reality that they were going to believe as true and face the consequences of in the future. I was finally able to understand the mistakes I had made and how hard it must have been for those who got tricked after they found out. That day I vowed to stop trading fake cards and shut my printing press for good.
