While scalping is an ever-present scourge for collectible card game players, it has become a completely ruinous issue for the Pokémon TCG for almost a year now. Ever since the release of Prismatic Evolutions in January 2025, it has been close to impossible for even specialist stores to stock new sets of the wildly popular game, online stores are wiped clean in seconds, and larger retailers see anything put out on shelves gone in minutes. This is in large part thanks to scalpers, who buy everything they can at once in order to sell it at inflated prices. It really sucks, so actually watching someone do it is breathtakingly gross. Er, you can do that below.
It would be easy to assume that scalping is just a bit of an annoyance, an act done by a few to cash in on the Pokémon TCG‘s current epic boom, causing people to gripe when they see unopened product on eBay for astronomical prices. But what’s happening at the moment is far more fundamental than this, with its now being normal to be unable to buy any packs of cards at all from any of the sets launched in the last year and a half. Even the official Pokémon Center websites, in every country, crash under the weight of bots and scalpers buying up everything the moment new sets are launched. This is despite purchase limitations and queues to access the sites, with bots seemingly able to easily exploit these barriers. And despite repeated promises from The Pokémon Company to address this with higher production rates, nothing seems to be changing or improving. My recent attempts to get a statement from the company regarding this have all been met with silence.
In fact, this weekend I spoke to owners of three independent specialist stores in three different towns about stock issues, and they all told me the same thing: they cannot even get enough stock to fulfill pre-orders, let alone have any left to sell on their shelves. One told me, under the promise of anonymity, that he recently attended a conference for stockists, and the Pokémon rep began his talk by saying, “I won’t be discussing supply issues at all.” He literally opened with that, and refused to take questions on it. It’s really grim out there, for both the customers who want to play the game and collect the cards, and also for the specialist stores that struggle to get people through the door when they’ve no cards to sell them.
So, it’s in all this context that this piece of shit acts like this:
What’s even more revolting here is this isn’t someone recording a video of a scalper they spotted in a store: this is the scalper recording themselves in the act, on a TikTok channel called “jamesthescalper”, to boast about their actions. The clip above has especially caught people’s eyes because of the kid in the cart, being surrounded by rack after rack of cards that this asshole is taking to sell at higher prices, as real customers try to take a pack or two before he snatches the lot.
In this video, you can watch people swarming a shelf to strip it the moment the boxes have been put out:
And in this video, we get to see him boasting about how he managed to break the two-box limit at CostCo by waiting for people to go on bathroom breaks, and then hiding boxes of cards inside luggage in the store to be able to get more the next day.
Clearly this is a very low-level scalping outfit, a guy showing off as he dumps boxes and packs on his child in a cart, clearly loving the attention. But as you can see in a bunch of his videos, he’s not the only one doing it at any of these restocks, and it’s happening in every store. And of course it’s nothing compared to the online scalpers using bot armies to strip-mine sites before real customers can even notice anything’s on sale.
Purchase limits and the like are only sticking plaster solutions to a far deeper issue, and the only effective response is to increase production to meet demand. If there’s no one to sell the scalped products to, then the scalping goes away. As I’ve said before, if this isn’t addressed, it’s going to have long-term effects on the companies involved. But if anything, The Pokémon Company is leaning hard the other way, with its most recent set deliberately including cards with such astonishing scarcity as to put rocket fuel under the situation. It will burst, because these bubbles always do, but until then it’s making things miserable for many.
