Police have arrested a 35-year-old man for allegedly stealing about 1,500 Pokemon cards worth ¥1.15 million from a store in Tokyo's Akihabara district. Rare Pokemon cards are traded at high prices.
According to investigators, Masaki Omori, from Urasoe, Okinawa Prefecture, has owned up to the charges against him — stealing, breaking and entering. He told police that he responded to a Twitter post and stole the cards based on instructions from another person, in what appears to be a case of yami baito, a term that loosely translates to "dark" or "shady" part-time jobs.
After Omori responded to the Twitter post, he was offered more than a million yen but the payment did not come through. Investigators are looking for the individual who gave the orders.
Omori was arrested for allegedly breaking into the Akihabara store at 5 a.m. on April 12 and stealing the Pokemon cards. Following the instructions he was given, Omori flew from Okinawa the day before the robbery, rented a car in Ibaraki Prefecture, and received the necessary tools, including a glove from a man waiting at a retail store in the Tokyo suburbs, according to investigators. Omori is suspected of handing over the Pokemon cards, which included one worth ¥160,000, to the man at the retail store after the robbery.
Similar incidents have occurred in recent weeks. In May, about 600 Pokemon trading cards were stolen from a store in Kumamoto Prefecture, just weeks after it opened. One of the cards was worth ¥600,000.
In Yamanashi Prefecture in May, a 25-year-old man was arrested for stealing ¥2.2 million worth of Pokemon cards.
"I wanted to sell them and make money," the man was quoted as saying by the police.