Is This The Part Where We Play A Trap Card Or Something?

I work in one of several shops in a roughly fifty-mile radius that buys, sells, and trades trading card games — think: Pokemon, YuGiOh, Magic: the Gathering, that kind of stuff, and almost all of it in single cards. We buy collections of cards rather frequently, and it’s not unusual that people will stop by without their cards just to gauge how we work and how things happen.

A guy comes in one evening. He seems nice enough. He tells me he was sent by another store of our acquaintance because they couldn’t afford to buy his collection. This gets flagged in my brain as a jackpot: good cards that we can then sell? Yes, please! 

I give him the email of my manager to schedule an appointment because it’s a very large collection of cards. He’s happy, I’m happy, and I send him on his merry way. 

I’m not there when he returns, but from what I hear from my other coworkers, he comes back with a LOT of boxes, large and small, and a couple of bins. Again, this is not unusual; collections of this size come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve had people come in with plastic bags of rubber-banded cards. You name it, we’ve probably seen it.

My manager tells one of my coworkers to grab a particular box; that’s where the “good” cards are. We know what cards these are, and they’re GOOD.

My coworker grabs said box… and said box is empty. 

Uh-oh. 

Cue the manager and several coworkers frantically going through the entire collection trying to find at least two cards. I’m told this takes upwards of six hours, and I believe it. They go through the collection. They go through it twice, thrice, several more times. The cards are nowhere to be found. 

We contact the guy and tell him the cards are gone.

Guy: *Nicely* “Shoot, I didn’t check the cards after I took them from the other shop. They are there, in the other shop; that’s how they knew it was a massive collection and they couldn’t afford it.”

We contacted the other shop. They didn’t have the cards, either, they claimed. Cue the other store frantically looking. 

Please note: the guy did NOT blame my store in ANY CAPACITY, AT ALL. He didn’t even seem that fazed, to be honest. These were EXTREMELY valuable products, so what was happening here? 

I came in for my shift the other day to get the lowdown on exactly what happened to those cards, and discovered a few things:

• An employee from the other store was let go. We were not told why.
• The other store cut the guy a check for the value of the missing cards.
• A regular at our store told us that the employee who had been let go had worked at that other store for some time…
• …and there were cameras filming what happened.
• There is now a court case.

I don’t know any other details, but it turns out that it wasn’t just those two cards, it was a grand total of forty cards missing. Where those cards went, who could say, but all I know for sure is that our store cut the guy our own check — for the cards he actually gave us. 

The guy was fine, was chill, and went along his merry way… and our store managed to dodge a massive bullet we didn’t even know was there.