By admin 
One Christmas, my grandmother, as my mother told it, went into a last-minute frenzy at the local Walmart searching for presents for my brother and me. When we arrived at her place, she had two boxes of Pokémon trading cards beneath the tree, costing her $90 altogether. My brother and I tore into the packs with delight to see what treasures were inside.
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We both managed to pull a shiny, holographic Beedrill, which, for the uninitiated, is a powerful creature that resembles a wasp.
That same Beedrill now sells for up to $450 on eBay. This is just one example of how collectibles have become a billion-dollar industry, sweeping the country with excitement and speculation.
I still get excited opening a fresh pack, but these days, I focus on Magic: The Gathering, a three decade old trading card game that posted $1.72 billion in revenues last year, according to Fortune Magazine. Now that I understand the market, I pay closer attention to what each card might be worth.
Collectors like me aren’t just worried for no reason — card theft is a real and growing problem for vendors and retailers alike.
In June, the California Highway Patrol recovered thousands of trading cards linked to a series of thefts at Target stores across Southern California, valued at approximately $15,000.
But there are also those working to build networks that protect people throughout the industry.
Closing the gap
Sacramento native Morgan Thomas, another passionate collector, dreamed of becoming a Pokémon vendor. She left her job and invested $10,000 to get started — a risk she saw as a smart bet.
“I could buy a $600 card and wait a year, and it could be $3,000. That can’t happen in the stock market,” Thomas said.
After a Sunday show in the Bay Area, Thomas was packing up when armed men robbed her at gunpoint. “I got totally robbed,” she told me. “My brain didn’t process anything… all my stuff is like gone in an instant.” Driving home, devastated by the sudden loss of her investment — $8,000 of her inventory to be exact — she started to wonder why there wasn’t an alarm system for stolen graded collectibles.
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“Why is there nothing like this for stolen graded cards?” she wondered.
In February, Thomas launched Kapture, a security and recovery tool designed to close the gap between the moment an item is stolen and when the collecting network begins searching for it.
She sold about half her collection to fund building the startup business.
When a Kapture subscriber reports a stolen graded item — say, at a card show — a mass text and email alert with details goes out to everyone in the network.
Instead of a quiet report buried in paperwork, the alert reaches many people at once. The aim is to increase the chances that a vendor or buyer recognizes the stolen item before any sale happens.
“Right now, the text and email alerts are free. If a vendor at this show has something stolen, they can report it to me, and I’ll send out a mass alert to everyone here,” she said.
Kapture seeks to fill a gap in an industry where consumers often lack security for money invested in collectibles. Law enforcement is sometimes limited in what it can do —especially when items lack serial numbers or a central registry. Even insurance can’t always replace what’s truly valuable, both financially and emotionally.
“We as collectors in the collectibles industry… have to come together,” Morgan said. “If we want to counteract this problem that’s happening, we have to use Kapture. We have to use one database, and we have to make sure that we’re all on the same program.”
Whether it’s a fresh Pokémon pull or a vintage Mickey Mantle card worth millions, collectibles can be a path to making a living..
The future of collecting should be as thrilling as its past — and with the right innovations, it can be.
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