Oh dairy me - looks like someone got caught with his hand in the ice cream jar.
Takashi Ono, a 43-year old man from Japan, was arrested today under suspicion of fraud, after attempting to win Pokémon cards through illegal means. A competition run by Japanese ice-cream manufacturers, Akagi Nyugyo Co., asked people to send in winning popsicle sticks from their Garigari-kun brand. The winning sticks have "You win a Gari-Pokémon card" engraved into them, and winners can send them back to the company in order to redeem them for rare Pokémon cards.
According to Japan Times, Ono is suspected of forging 25 winning popsicle sticks in total. The company contacted police after growing suspicious of so many winning sticks from one person. There are even reports of similar winning sticks selling on auction sites for upwards of $500 (around £367), although a box of the ice creams costs just $3 (£2.20).
PokeGuardian's coverage of the story states that at least one person had to open 41 boxes before finding one lucky stick - it looks like each box has 6 lollies in it, which means that the odds of winning (at least for them) were around 1/246. That means, in order to find 25 sticks, Ono might have had to eat around 6,000 of the pineapple-flavoured treats. Yeah, we see why the company was suspicious.
All this for Pokémon cards? You better believe it. The winning sticks receive a limited-edition Mythical Zarude card, as a tie-in for the upcoming Pokémon movie, Secrets of the Jungle, which comes out in the West this year. The card itself sells for around $300 (£220). Here's the bad boy himself:
Would you pretend to have eaten thousands of ice lollies for a potential profit? Is this the coolest crime ever committed, or the lamest? Discuss your thoughts below in the comments!
[source japantimes.co.jp, via otakuusamagazine.com]
Comments 21
I...wowie. How low in priorities do you have to be?
Uh...if you can't do the time, don't do the crime I suppose? Imagine explaining your fraudulent popsicle stick crime to fellow inmates to obtain valuable Pokemon cards. This could have been the plot for a character in Holes, their nickname would be Popsicle. Or Freezy Pop. Or Sticks.
If they are worth £220 each already then buying 6000 lollies to claim 25 (average cost £240 each based on £1 for each lolly) almost makes sense when you think about the potential future value of them.
Still bonkers but perhaps it isn’t fraud.
@neyoung8 heck yeah! Crime pays! Especially when you get to eat a ton of ice cream
That pokemon looks awful.
@NinjaWaddleDee : The movie looks worse, being a 90 minute version of what is perhaps the worst episode in the first season of the television series: The Kangaskhan Kid.
.....a 43 year-old man cheating on a Pokemon contest for cards....wtf?
@AndyC_MK84 41 boxes times 3$ = 1 card at $123
$123 times 25 cards = $3075
If you say the cards are worth £220 on average, that would be £220 times 25 = £5500, which would still be a nice profit, so I don't get your point..
How old was this guy? This is not being a fan. This guy was just out to make money. Shameful.
Looks like the highest sold stick price was 35555 yen ($345, £253) on mercari (which isn't auctions btw, it's more like Loot - set a price and haggle). So unless it was another site, the stick prices and card prices are pretty similar.
@AndyC_MK84
Looking through the source links, apparently the lolly boxes were hard to find, so even finding 25 x 41 boxes might have been the hard part.
@KateGray Honestly I'd buy that much ice cream for that Zarude card
@Bizaster Greedy plan. 4 maybe.
@Heavyarms55 You win most obvious comment of the day.
Curiously enough, I believe that “eating a bunch of ice cream until you to end up with a giant ape” was the initial pitch for Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze.
Glad they changed it. And that no one got arrested.
That's some Yu-Gi-Oh plot right there. Except it's Pokemon.
should've been kingdom hearts : destiny's embrace , but yea so fake
"Would you pretend to have eaten thousands of ice lollies"
And my first thought was the '90s "Pepsi Stuff" promotions. Wondered how people could possibly drink through so many packages to earn some of the merch, as I think it was only later years they added an option to buy with cash. (which one guy tried to use to get the commercial's joke prize of a real helicopter)
@LilMuku would you eat the card, though? That's the real question.
@KingMike It was a harrier jet for 7,000,000 Pepsi points. Two things in particular made this really crazy. Pepsi let customers buy additional points for .10 USD per point if they were short of their total needed for a prize; great if you needed 200 more points for the jacket. The second thing was there originally wasn’t any small print saying that the jet was a joke prize.
So following Pepsi’s rules, a jet that cost approximately $33 million USD at the time could be purchased with a couple Pepsi points and a check of $700,000 USD to make up the difference. The guy who attempted this actually found some financially well off backers to help him with the check and the rest is courtroom/consumer rights history.
Long story short, he ended up suing. He did not get his jet, but Pepsi ended up changing the point total required for the jet to 700,000,000 , essentially discouraging people from even trying to obtain it since the cost in Pepsi points was now more than twice that of the jet.
@KateGray If I had two yes
My goal in life is to consume Zarude through any and every orifice, probably
In order to get 25 of those popsicle sticks, they must’ve had to spent $18,000, and since the card itself is worth $300, you get 25 of them, so it would be worth $7500 combined, so is it really worth spending that much legitimately? No, so I can see why they were suspicious. Figured I’d share the math to you guys.
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