Rare video games collection heist

This happens in the NFT world, too. Auction an item then anonymously bid it up to millions with multiple fake buyer accounts (winning the auction). The only money you lose is the money paid to the auction house in fees. But you’ve now established a new price point for the cartridge or NFT.

For example this expose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A

But I think it's fair to say that the people who are paying these prices are not interested in gaming per se, instead seeing their purchases as investments - after all the prices keep going up, and their grades are "the best". What could go wrong? (Ignoring the fact that millions of cartridges exist, of course.)

There is absolutely fraudulent pricing in the collectors market. But it does calcify in people's minds to cause real transactions. Insurance values for your illiquid possession because they're based around a fraudulent but highly publicized price elsewhere, a charitable donation of an illiquid asset and tax deduction being based around a fraudulent but highly publicized transaction elsewhere. Of course, all currently unknown as fraudulent at the time, and unproven to be fraudulent, and by completely different people in the transaction.

The other thing to help you make a rounded opinion is looking at price distortions across all niche collectors markets. Delaware license plates went absolutely wild in pricing over the past several years, just like some trading cards, just like some video game cartridges, just like non fungible tokens. So its almost unproductive to put too much scrutiny on any specific market.

Yes, there is fraudulent pricing, yes, it affects how people do real transactions that also happen. Pricing is based on prior pricing, not based on whether there exist anyone sitting around willing to pay it.

The last prior price exists indefinitely at a volume of 0, until someone negotiates something different.

In some opaque markets based on magic, like at fine art galleries, they manipulate prices slowly upwards by using their market position to resist negotiation pressure and simply saying what the price is, and guilt tripping any buyer into saying "surely your interest in this piece is exclusively because you love the piece, it should bring you joy, market dynamics? hogwash!". with the only variable being if some collector or estate floods the market with a specific artist's work, which rarely happens so they don't need to adjust.

I worked at a pawn shop for 4 years and I learned a valuable lesson in this regard. Collectibles are never worth what they say they are because most people don't want them, and the people who do want them never want to pay full price.

To quote an old adage: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The bird in the hand being liquid currency, the two in the bush being a hypothetical valuation of a collectible sitting on your shelf.

There are extraordinarily few collectibles that you can throw online and instantly get a full value bid on. Unfortunately old video games is not one of them.

If there's not a market, you can try to create one. Especially if you have a good collection yourself. Hype stuff up on YouTube, talk about it collector forums, drive bids up high on eBay and all of a sudden, you've reset the market. I know it's not that easy, but it's a hustle.

Now that these collectibles are expensive, and talked about as such in mainstream media (like, I don't know, Vanity Fair) so everyone knows they're expensive, all of a sudden they are a status symbol, like a Jackson Pollock or diamond ring.

Until you've had your bike stolen (or known people who have), you just can't imagine it happening with clarity.

Therefore I don't really think it's cognitive dissonance as much as lack of imagination.

Dissonance would be if there were break-in attempts that he ignored. Or if he got threats and did nothing.

He didn't actually have concrete reason to believe that he was a target.

Stored that collection in an area anyone could locate with a google search.

Did not have agreed value insurance for the collectable games, likely because he was worried about documenting the collection to avoid taxes.

The vault/safe were non-functional.

There were no interior or exterior video cameras.

Considered collectable items his "retirement plan" (again, avoiding taxes would be my guess.)

Absolutely insane. At least he seems to have landed on his feet - he's now employed as a video game grader by CGC.

The other thing that is insane is that over and over the other video game store owners strongly suspected or knew what was going on, had had opportunities to call police, and plenty of ability to stall the thieves. One of several examples:

> Again, Jackson declined to provide any ID. While Young pretended to look up prices—he had no intention of purchasing any of the games—he told a colleague to take a picture of Jackson’s license plate. Young remembered reading about Trade-N-Games, and he called Brassard.

Oh. My. God.

Call. The. FUCKING. POLICE. In many states you don't even have to call - you can text, so it just looks like you're fucking around on your cell phone.

For example, if what you have moves into hundreds of millions of dollars (not the case here) then any safe is no longer sufficient, you need to move to a vault and armed guards.

But I didn't get the impression that the thief here really knew what he was after - he seemed to do a really poor job pawning the stolen goods (and settled for a lowball figure in some cases for games that were worth much more).

To me it seems like a boring robbery - they went after the safe because those typically contain valuables (in this case it also contained cash and precious metals). I'm not sure he ever realized the value of the games he'd stolen.

Someone might buy it for 5 dollars.