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 to a trading card authentication company Tuesday about the theft of an estimated $963,000 worth of cards from a FedEx truck, Santa Ana police spokesperson 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 grading service” and says it can sell customers’ cards online for a percentage of the selling price to “turn cards into currency.”
Nick Andrews, known on social media as the Boston Card Hunter, said on X that there are multiple victims of the theft, one of whom he said lost $500,000 worth of cards.
When all is said and done, he said, the heist could be one of the biggest in trading card history.
He has compiled a list of cards claimed to have been taken in the theft that numbered as high as 383 on Monday evening. Among them, as the video game news site IGN noted, were a 1995 Upper Deck 23K Gold Michael Jordan card and a 2024 One Piece Simplified Chinese 1st Anniversary Set Nami.
Card trader Sky-B, who said he wants to be referred to only under that moniker, discussed cards he said he lost in the theft in a video on YouTube on Monday.
“These were 104 cards that I’ve accumulated over two years,” he said. “There are many irreplaceable cards in here that I will never see again. And, honestly, that’s what hurts the most — outside of obviously being absolutely financially destroyed here.”
He said the missing cards were dropped off at Professional Sports Authenticator, where they were certified and started their journey back to him in Michigan before he discovered they had been stolen.
Sky-B said he paid $8,000 in grading fees and lamented that he would be out the likely increased value that the grading added to his cards, which he said were insured up to $156,000 — below their likely market value.
A company spokesperson said in an email that grading fees would be returned, along with the fair market value of the cards involved.
In a statement, the company said it is working with investigators and has deactivated the stolen cards’ certificates.
“We have deactivated the certificates for the stolen items and notified marketplace partners so they can be on the lookout for rare and serialized items,” a Professional Sports Authenticator spokesperson said.
FedEx said in a statement that getting to the bottom of the theft is paramount.
“The security of our customers’ shipments is a top priority, and we are working with local law enforcement in their investigation,” it said.
Garcia, the police spokesperson, said the value of the stolen goods could rise.
“It remains an open case,” she said, “and we have not made any arrests or recovered any stolen goods.”
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.