THE SCAM THAT DUPED POKÉMON'S MOST OBSESSIVE CARD COLLECTORS AND THE AMATEUR SLEUTH WHO EXPOSED THE TRUTH

THE FIRST TIME Jason held a set of Pokémon cards was in 1999, when he was 9 years old and he received a pack as a birthday gift.

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Scott Mastromatteo sorts through a small portion of his collection of more than 2,000 graded Pokémon TCG cards.

Jason had no idea that the pieces of shiny cardboard in his hands were small bits of history: The first sets of Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards had appeared in North America only months earlier. All he knew was that he was entranced by the brightly colored holographic images. In the game, two players acting as Pokémon trainers battle using decks of 60 cards, trying to knock out each other’s Pokémon and claim their prize cards. After learning to play, he became an avid collector, storing cards in binders, only pausing in college while working toward an engineering degree. Not long after graduating in 2013, he flipped through one of his binders, did some research, and found that every card had doubled in price on the secondary marketplace. (Several of the collectors in this story, including Jason, have asked to be identified by first names or pseudonyms because of the amounts of money at stake.)

“I was kind of shook,” he says.

As Jason delved back into Pokémon TCG, he learned that the creative minds behind the game were still at it, releasing new cards that didn’t exist when he was a kid. Living in the Bay Area and working at a Fortune 500 company, Jason had been pondering investment strategies; he’d come of age during the 2008 Wall Street crash and had reservations about the stock market. He zeroed in on his childhood passion after concluding from his research that Pokémon cards could outperform the S&P 500. “I actually started putting money into testing different parts of the [Pokémon TCG] market, which were significantly smaller than what they are today,” he says. “I was able to test and grow with the markets.”