Nearly 7000kg of Counterfeit Pokemon Cards Headed to the Netherlands Have Been Intercepted by Chinese Customs

That's alot of fake shiny cardboard

Shanghai Pudong International Airport Customs in China have intercepted a batch of counterfeit Pokemon cards weighing a total of 7.6 tons together. This is one of their biggest cases of intellectual property protection at this airport in years.

These faked Pokemon cards were headed to the Netherlands (and most likely to be resold in Europe as genuine products). This cargo was declared for export by from what it seems by the company Qingdao Import and Export Co., Ltd. The declared brand was "None" and because of that there was a suspicion of copyright infringement. Customs officers opened the boxes at the scene and thoroughly checked and found that the goods were actually cards marked with the trademark "Pokemon" (hereinafter referred to as Pokemon cards).

Since Pokemon is copyrighted, it's not allowed to counterfeit their intellectual property. This batch of counterfeit cards infringed the exclusive rights of Nintendo, Creatures, and Game Freak. According to the news article on 163.com, 20 boxes (pallets) containing 400,000 booster packs, with an actual weight of over 7.6 tons have been intercepted by customs. As of now, they are still investigating this case.

Pokemon TCG cards have been very popular and has been growing rapidly and have sold 3.7 billion Pokemon cards in fiscal year 2020/2021 (as of the end of March 2021). They are also very popular to sell on the secondary market such as eBay Japan with Japanese Pokemon Cards still growing at an rapid pace and trading cards in general ranked first place again 'most sold products' for the fifth consecutive term.

We absolutely don't recommend to buy counterfeit goods. Counterfeit cards don't cost alot to import and could be seen as a cheap alternative option for certain people to buy that want many Pokemon cards for a cheap price.

Not only are they not on par with the quality standards The Pokemon Company International has for their cards, counterfeit goods are illegal to import and sell in many countries and may get you in trouble at customs. Lastly these cards are illegal for official Pokemon TCG events and have no resale value on the secondary market because they are counterfeit.

We strongly urge you to learn how to identify counterfeit Pokemon cards and recommend buying them at official retail stores to minimize risk.