Pokémon Card Scalper Put GPS Tracker On Delivery Driver's Vehicle To Follow Restocks

There are two kinds of people trying to catch 'em all in the wild Pokémon collector card market: actual true-fan collectors, and of course, the scalpers. Scalpers, no matter what arena they play in (cards, tickets, Hot Wheels, even DMV appointments) tend to find more inventive ways to ruin the fun of taking part in our favorite pastimes. In a story first shared by Fox8, one of them was a 72-year-old Ohio man recently found guilty for placing a GPS tracking device on the vehicle of a female delivery driver so he could follow those cards. Luckily, his punishment ended up also fitting the crime.

Kent Kubasta was likely hard at work in his local Walmart parking lot back in June of this year, trying to get ahead of the Pokémon card deliveries so he could continue to resell them to both children and adults at gouged prices. According to the affidavit filed with the Wayne County, Ohio courts, Kubasta had placed a Spytec GPS tracking device on a woman's vehicle while she was making a delivery of the precious commodity at the store. Kubasta admitted to police that he was placing the GPS on her car to track her location and where she was delivering Pokémon cards. The victim, whose name is redacted in all of the court documents filed (the Justice Department could take note of how they did that), promptly found and reported the device to police.

Kubasta originally pled not guilty to the charge of illegal use of a tracking device or application back in June. However, not turning himself over to the Wayne County jail by the July 7 deadline might not have helped his original case. His plea changed to no contest this week, and he was sentenced to one year's probation, and somewhat ironically will have to wear a GPS monitoring device for the next 90 days.

It's wild, although somewhat believable in this current dystopian timeline, that Kubasta resorted to placing a GPS tracking device on a driver's vehicle for Pokémon cards. And on a woman's vehicle, nonetheless. But that's the extreme to which these scalpers are happy to go to get any sort of edge on acquiring these cards. Their efforts have forced stores to put limits on card purchases and put vending machines out of order. It unfortunately makes sense, as there's a lot of money in Pokémon, to the extent that people are using rare cards to actually pay off debts to drug dealers.

Yet there are so many other ways to find cards and get at them early, without resigning to illegal activities. From just a quick initial search there are subreddits like r/PokemonDeals and r/PokemonRestocks and sites like Restockd, which provides alerts for online restocks of cards at major retailers like the Pokémon Center, Target, Amazon, and Walmart.

Instead, we're once again writing a story where someone decides its ok put a GPS tracker on a vehicle, which never ends well for the person who places it. And again, we'll offer this guide to finding tracking devices on your car, because apparently no one is safe. Not even the people who deliver joy to stores for children and some of us child-like adults chasing the nostalgia train.