Pokéka” and “Yu-Gi-Oh Cards,” whose prices are skyrocketing, are being used for “money laundering” by the underworld!

Easy to buy and sell, no reeds attached, and they easily got through airport customs.

The trading card world is heating up like never before. Cards of “Yu-Gi-Oh!”, “One Piece”, and other popular anime have skyrocketed in price across the board. Pokémon cards (a.k.a. Pokéka), which are originally designed for competitive games, are particularly popular, but rare cards with low appearance rates, such as “Special Art Rare” and “Ultra Rare,” are being sold at high prices. In some cases, the price of POKEKA, which are popular among foreign players, quickly increases several times, and the resale market has never seen such a boom.

Cards that used to sell for several hundred to several thousand yen now fetch several million to several tens of millions of yen. Prices fluctuate daily according to the supply-demand balance, and there are websites dedicated to checking real-time price movements, so it has become like a financial product. There are even some full-time “resellers” who make several million yen a month by repeatedly buying and selling,” said a collector in his 20s in Tokyo.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of Pokéka. The fact that a number of related events will be held this year is said to have contributed to the soaring prices.

I get the impression that there is a sudden increase in the number of people doing the “Sedori” business, which is not a hobby, but rather a way to make money by collecting information on SNS, buying at low prices, and selling at higher prices. It has become an object of investment” (another collector).

In fact, antisocial forces are now taking notice of the unprecedented boom in trading cards and abusing them, which is quite disturbing. A person who has contacts with a wide range of crime syndicates and is well versed in the underworld business reveals, “In essence, it’s money laundering.

In short, it’s money laundering. Money from special scams and other mysterious sources cannot be deposited in banks. If you have a large amount of cash on hand, the police will look at it, and you run the risk of being robbed by another criminal organization, so you want to clean it up and move it to a safe place. In the past, people used to buy accounts in other people’s names and deposit money into them or exchange it for gold bars (gold), but the crackdown on that is getting tougher, too. With popular pokémon, the price is unlikely to drop, and they are small enough to store. And they can be cashed in quickly.”

A manager of a popular card store near Akihabara, Tokyo, also testified.

Recently, we have received a sudden increase in inquiries from the police about customers who have bought and sold cards,” he said. We require customers to show a driver’s license or other identification, but some stores do not check IDs. In some cases, counterfeit IDs are used, so it’s hard to trace them back to the person in question.”

Trekkers are also used to take black money overseas, he said.

“If you try to take a large amount of cash or precious metals out of the country, you run the risk of getting caught in baggage checks, but with Trekkies, even super-rare cards costing several million yen each look like toys. If the amount is not too large, customs will not bother you. There are groups that regularly use young people to take out money in the form of Treecards,” said a person familiar with money laundering.

An active investigator also says, “We sometimes find high-value pokémon at the homes of people involved in cases.

Not only in fraud, but also in illegal businesses such as drugs and black market casinos, there are those who convert the proceeds of their crimes into popular cards. However, unlike gold bullion, the cards do not have individual serial numbers, so it is difficult to determine where they were obtained and to prove the flow of money by that alone. It is difficult to prove the flow of money by that alone. The current situation is that it is quite difficult to clarify the actual situation,” said a Metropolitan Police investigator.

Like an “underground bank

In the course of our interviews, we received information that “foreigners are buying Trekkies in a clearly unnatural way these days.

One holiday afternoon, while observing a certain shop in Tokyo, we went to ……. Two Asian men entered the store looking familiar. One was wearing a casual but high-brand hoodie, the other was looking at a smartphone screen and approached the clerk, buying one expensive and popular card after another.

They used their credit cards to make the purchases and left with about 2.5 million yen worth of Trekkies in their hands in about 10 minutes without even looking at the designs. A person familiar with money laundering explained, “It must be a Chinese.

It must have been the Chinese,” said a person familiar with the money laundering business. In China, the Chinese are strictly restricted from taking yuan out of their home country, and only a small amount of cash can be brought into Japan. So they use Chinese credit cards, such as UnionPay cards, to buy Pokékas in Japan and immediately resell them.

The purchase price is paid in Chinese yuan, but they can earn foreign currency (yen) by selling the Pokékas. This method is used when people want to start a business in Japan or need cash on hand.

A system like an underground bank has been set up through the Trekkers.

There are also groups that travel overseas and bring rare cards back to Japan to sell them, and in many cases they do not report the profits. Although card sales companies have called for a ban on resale, “they still do what they want,” according to a source close to the matter.

The reality that popular Trekkies have become a tool of the underworld has come to the fore.

From the June 5 and 12, 2026 issue of FRIDAY