A brazen thief stole more than $113,000 worth of Pokémon cards from a Massachusetts store, officials said Friday, launching a real-life Pokémon Go search for the suspect and the rare collectibles.
The break-in at 1st Edition Collectibles on Purchase Street in New Bedford, about 60 miles outside downtown Boston, occurred just after 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, police said. The thief "broke in and stole several high-value collectible items," New Bedford police spokesperson Holly Huntoon said in a statement.
No arrests had been made as of late Friday morning.
"It sucks. I mean, you work hard, and obviously, something like this happening is not a good" thing, store co-owner Sean Vieira told NBC News. "But I mean, it's just money. No one died. So, I mean, it's down to the world."
Store owners placed the loss at about $113,650.
The stolen Pokémon cards are so rare and valuable that local collectors would be able to recognize them on the market, Vieira said.
The store had surveillance cameras, but police have told owners not to disclose many details of the heist as detectives continue their search.
Nine summers ago, the Pokémon Go smartphone app was released, sending fans of the fictional Japanese characters into semi-virtual searches on their local streets.
Now, Pokémon collectors can help search for these stolen cards similarly.
"It's definitely one of those things that I would say that's (the stolen merchandise) pretty easily identifiable for sure," Vieira said.
"The cards have serial numbers, and no boxes are the same. So there are imperfections in the boxes that we could probably use to identify, you know, the exact one. Again, it's not a lot of them out there," he added.
