Pokemon cards’ most enthusiastic collectors? Money launderers
The market for Pokemon cards it absolutely booming, but there’s a more sinister force than nerdy millennials at play, writes Paul Ormerod
A hitherto obscure market hit the news last week. The market for Pokemon cards is absolutely booming.
Pokemon is a gigantic Japanese media franchise. A key aspect of the franchise is of course video games. A collectable card game was introduced based around the concept in 1996.
Devotees of the card game have bought and sold the cards almost ever since, mainly for small sums with $100 being regarded as a decent price.
In the past couple of years, prices have risen stratospherically with many trades being in the low tens of thousands of dollars for a single card. In February, one was sold for $16.5m.
At first glance, this has all the hallmarks of a speculative bubble like the original tulip mania in the Netherlands in the 17th century. But the reason for the spectacular rise in prices is altogether more sinister: the cards are being used by criminals to launder cash on a major scale.
Why money launderers love Pokemon
You have built up a stash of cash illegally. Buy a Pokemon card and sell it. Repeat the process. After a few iterations, to all intents and purposes your money is clean.
You need to move a few million from one country to another? Send a few couriers with cards in their luggage.
No one could have anticipated that this rather niche and nerdy market would evolve in this way.
A recent book on money laundering sets out in detail how criminals and terrorist organisations have used a wide variety of means to move money around which makes a mockery of the whole panoply or regulations set up to try to detect and deter money laundering. Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough offers a fascinating and highly recommended insight into the world of money laundering. The scale is enormous.
Only this week the Finance Innovation Lab has published an estimate of £325bn of dirty money flowing through the UK every year. Once our various offshoots and dependencies such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands are included, the figure approaches one trillion pounds.
Bullough points out that serious attempts to stamp out money laundering began around 1970. Since then, multiple international treaties have been agreed, a global framework has been adopted and specialised police forces have been created. They have their occasional triumphs, but it is mainly all to no avail.
Another case: Bicester Village
The author gives as a simple and relatively modest example: the shopping outlet Bicester Village. Many of the customers are young Chinese who act, in Bullough’s words, like “shelf-stackers in reverse”, removing items with dedicated intensity.
Much of the purchasing power comes from British gangsters who have received shipments of drugs from China. They recruit young people to buy luxury items perfectly legally, which are then shipped back to China and sold with the proceeds going to the original suppliers of the drugs. More generally, shipments of trade offer a good cover. Ten million dollars in cash can easily be hidden in a large container ship with little risk of discovery.
The myriad of regulations around the movement of money do little to solve the problem. Instead, companies and individuals are forced to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in time and effort to comply with them.
The whole system of control offers an excellent illustration of the difference between intention and outcome. The regulators mean well, but the effective value of their efforts is very low. There are lessons here for wide swathes of regulation and the complex processes so beloved by the Prime Minister.
Paul Ormerod is an honorary professor at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester