A crime wave that started in Melbourne and hasn't really stopped
Over roughly six months to early 2025, a string of break-ins hit trading card and hobby stores across Melbourne. General Games owner Ryan Streets told the ABC he'd heard 16 different stores had been broken into over that period. Umit Berkant, who runs Blacklist Cards and Collectables in Thomastown, said his store alone lost "probably over $20,000 or $25,000" worth of stock across two separate break-ins in the space of two months. By February 2025, Cherry in West Melbourne had become the tenth store in the area hit in just three months. Shop owners collectively estimated the total haul across the spree at around $1 million in stolen trading cards, driven in large part by the scarcity and resale value of the Scarlet & Violet: Prismatic Evolutions expansion.
On 16 February 2025, Victoria Police charged four people after dismantling what they described as an organised syndicate behind the burglaries. Police seized approximately $50,000 worth of Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and AFL trading cards, alongside firearms, ammunition and car keys, from a Melbourne home. The same syndicate was linked to the theft of six cryptocurrency ATMs from businesses in Hoppers Crossing, Bentleigh, Brunswick, Werribee and Vermont, and had allegedly targeted collectable card stores in Epping, Moonee Ponds and Eumemmerring. Detective Inspector Patrick Watkinson said police were "confident that we have apprehended the main offenders who were sharing their criminal trade craft with lesser offenders."
It didn't stop with the arrests
The Melbourne charges closed one chapter, not the problem. In October 2025, thieves broke into a Pop Attack trading card vending machine at Greenway Plaza in Wetherill Park, western Sydney, at around 3am, smashing through two layers of tempered glass to take more than 1,000 cards worth over $20,000. Separately, police in Port Macquarie, on the New South Wales mid-north coast, investigated an early-morning break-in at a local business in which trading cards were allegedly stolen, well outside the Melbourne and Sydney metro areas where most coverage has focused.
The pattern across these incidents mirrors the same dynamics driving similar crime waves overseas: high resale value, genuine or perceived scarcity, and a secondary market efficient enough to absorb stolen product quickly. What it confirms locally is that this is not a one-off Melbourne story. It's a recurring, spreading problem, and Australian collectors and store owners are the ones absorbing the losses in the meantime.
Why the values at stake changed the risk profile
The scale of what's now sitting in ordinary hobby shops and private collections has shifted materially. An estimated $1 million stolen across roughly a dozen Melbourne-area stores works out to something in the order of $60,000 to $80,000 per premises, well beyond what most business or contents insurance would assume a small collectables retailer holds in stock at any one time. At the top end, the category's ceiling keeps climbing too: in February 2026, a PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator sold for 16,492,000 US dollars at Goldin Auctions, a Guinness World Record for any trading card ever sold, underlining just how much value this category can now concentrate into a handful of physical items.
That combination, rising baseline values across ordinary collections and record-setting ceilings at the top, is exactly the environment in which a collection's insured value needs to be revisited regularly rather than set once and forgotten.
The underinsurance numbers in Australia
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission's own research, published in its report Getting Home Insurance Right, has long put the proportion of underinsured Australian homeowners as high as 80 percent. More recent survey data adds detail to that picture: 32.8 percent of Australian policyholders admit to guessing the value of their insured items rather than determining their actual worth, and the median sum insured for household contents nationally sits at around $50,000, a figure that can be consumed quickly by furniture, electronics and appliances well before a card collection is even factored in.
Separate research from Compare the Market found that 72.1 percent of Australian households haven't updated their contents cover since buying a major household item, and 38.9 percent of people who do hold contents insurance say they're unsure exactly what level of cover they actually have. None of this data was collected with trading cards specifically in mind, but it describes precisely the conditions under which a fast-appreciating, easily overlooked asset class like Pokémon or One Piece cards slips through a standard policy unnoticed.
Why a standard contents policy won't cover a real collection
The mechanics of a typical Australian contents policy make the gap concrete. Under Suncorp's personal valuables cover, for example, unspecified items, meaning anything not individually listed on the policy, are capped at just $1,000 per item, pair, set or collection. Read literally, an entire unspecified card collection, no matter how many boxes or how many graded singles it contains, can be capped at $1,000 in total unless it has been separately scheduled. NRMA and other major insurers operate on a similar principle: valuable items and collections need to be specifically listed to receive cover beyond the default general contents limit.
Set against a Melbourne syndicate accused of taking roughly $1 million from a dozen stores, or a single Sydney vending machine holding over $20,000 in stock, a $1,000 unspecified-items cap illustrates just how far behind default cover has fallen relative to what collectors and small retailers are actually holding.
How Australian insurers already handle this at the top end
Insurers themselves already treat memorabilia and collectibles claims differently once they move beyond routine contents cover, which is instructive. IAG, Australia's largest general insurance group and the company behind NRMA, SGIO, SGIC, CGU, Swann Insurance and the Coles insurance brand, maintains a dedicated valuation and replacement process specifically for claims in the memorabilia sector. That arrangement exists because IAG recognises that a generic contents assessment isn't adequate for these assets once a genuine claim is lodged.
The Australian Memorabilia Association, established in 2010, provides a parallel example from outside the major insurers. Its valuations are used directly in insurance claims, including fire and flood losses, as well as in family law matters and formal dispute resolution and court proceedings. In other words, once a collectibles claim moves past a routine payout, both insurers and the legal system already expect an independent, defensible valuation to be part of the process. The gap isn't in what's expected at claim time. It's in how few collectors have that documentation in place before they need it.
What proper cover actually requires
The fix implied by all of this data is consistent: an independent, evidence-based valuation, completed and scheduled on the policy before a loss occurs, not assembled after the fact from memory and old receipts. That means physical inspection rather than a valuation based on photos alone, verified ownership documentation, and comparable sales analysis grounded in multiple recent transactions rather than a single online listing, prepared to a standard that insurers, brokers and underwriters can actually rely on when assessing risk and settling a claim.
Given the current run of incidents across Melbourne, Sydney and regional New South Wales, and how quickly this category is appreciating in value more broadly, the practical message for Australian collectors and store owners is straightforward: if a collection hasn't been independently valued and specifically scheduled on a policy in the last year, it should be treated as underinsured until proven otherwise.
TCG VALUATIONS
Every incident above traces back to the same root cause: a gap between what a collection is actually worth and what is on record with an insurer. TCG Valuations provides insurance-grade, PI-backed valuation reports for Pokémon cards, sports cards, collectible toys, video games and other pop culture assets across Australia, built on physical inspection, verified provenance and current comparable sales data, so your policy reflects what you actually hold. If your collection or shop stock has never been formally valued, or hasn't been reassessed since the current wave of thefts began, now is the time to get it properly documented, before a claim forces the conversation.
Sources:
ABC News, Melbourne trading card store burglary spree coverage; Stevivor, "Pokemon Trading Card thefts targeting Melbourne-based retailers"; Vooks, "Months long string of Pokémon TCG fuelled robberies continuing across Melbourne"; Ground News / Inner East Review / Western Advocate, Victoria Police syndicate charges coverage (16 February 2025); GamesHub, "Two men charged over collectible card thefts in Melbourne"; Popverse, "There is a Pokémon card crime syndicate in Australia"; Vending Times, "Thieves steal $20K in Pokémon cards from Australia vending machine"; Port News, "Trading cards allegedly stolen from local business in early morning break-in"; Goldin Auctions / Guinness World Records, Pikachu Illustrator record sale coverage; ASIC Report 54, "Getting home insurance right"; Compare the Market Australia, contents insurance underinsurance survey data; Insurance Business Australia, Australian homeowners underinsurance reporting; Suncorp, Home and Contents Insurance PDS, personal valuables cover; NRMA Insurance, Valuable and Portable Contents cover explainer; TCG Valuations Strategic Marketing Framework, IAG memorabilia claims arrangement; Australian Memorabilia Association, valuations for insurance, legal and dispute resolution matters