In 2020, a Georgia man applied for a federal COVID relief loan for his small business.
He claimed he ran an entertainment company with 10 employees and $235,000 in revenue. The government wired him $85,000 to help him survive the pandemic.
He spent $57,789 of it on a single Pokemon card. A Beckett 9.5 1st Edition Charizard.
The business didn’t exist. The FBI traced the money, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and he was sentenced to three years in federal prison. The card was seized.
Anyone know what happened to the card?
A Pokemon card with a Magic: The Gathering back.
In 1998, Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic the gathering, won the rights to bring Pokemon to the West. The game was already a hit in Japan, but no English version existed yet. Their first test prints featured Blastoise printed on Magic card stock, Deckmaster logo and all.
Fewer than ten are known to exist. One was discovered in a storage unit left behind by a shuttered game store. Another sold at auction for $216,000.
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In 1952, @Topps shipped its baseball series late in the season. Kids had already moved on for the year, and many of the cards didn’t sell. Crates of leftovers went into a Brooklyn warehouse where they sat for years.
Topps exec Sy Berger offered them to carnivals at 10 packs for a penny. Nobody wanted cards from old seasons.
So around 1960, needing the space, Berger loaded several hundred cases onto a barge and dumped them into the Atlantic Ocean. Mantles, Mays, Robinsons, gone.
One of those cards was the rookie of a 20-year-old the back of the card called “the successor to Joe DiMaggio”: Mickey Mantle, #311.
In 2022, a near-perfect one sold for $12.6 million. Most of the remain at the bottom of the ocean.
In 1990, @Topps accidentally printed some Frank Thomas rookies without his name on the front.
Nobody knows how many were made before printing stopped but PSA has graded 301, and only 1 has achieved a perfect 10.
That card sold in March 2026 for $183,000 via @HeritageAuction.