What was seized
On 4 November 2026, Dutch customs announced it had seized 1,719,000 counterfeit Pokémon cards in a container at the Port of Rotterdam. Half the container was cards: 9,300 boxes holding 142,800 packs. Stacked on end they would have stood more than 515 metres — nearly three times the height of Rotterdam's Euromast tower.
Two details matter more than the headline.
The officer who opened the container did not believe the cards were fake. They looked real, but something did not sit right, and the officer stopped the container. It took a counterfeit specialist arriving with a genuine card to make the difference visible — and the differences were ordinary: different colouring, paper and images, and no reference to the trademark holder on the copies.
And the inspection happened in May. Customs announced it in November, only after the rights holder had confirmed the counterfeiting and the cards had been destroyed. That confirmation is the gate.
Inspection is not a control
The officer was right to be suspicious and wrong to be certain. A specialist was needed because a trained eye working alone does not separate a good copy from a real one at volume.
Visual inspection is a sample-based control: it catches the copy that is visibly wrong and passes the copy that is well made. The Rotterdam copies were good enough to clear a customs officer's first look. They were found because someone with a reference sample stood next to them.
A brand that relies on a consumer noticing, or a marketplace reviewer noticing, has adopted a control that fails on exactly the copies that matter most.
The trust layer got forged as well
In January 2026, a jury in Manhattan convicted Anthony Curcio of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for a nationwide scheme selling sports and Pokémon cards with forged grades. According to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the method was to clean the rating and serial numbers off real PSA labels and print fake 9s and 10s with new serial numbers. Attempted losses ran to more than $2 million.
The standard advice for buyers — check the certification number against the grader's public database — was defeated by the method itself. A copied number still points at a real card that was genuinely graded. A number on a label is only as good as its binding to the physical unit.
The cheap end is not the safe end
These were not rare cards and not graded slabs. They were sealed booster packs — the low-price end of a hobby where a single rare card can sell for thousands.
PSA, the authentication and grading company, released its 2025 fraud report:
- $200 million-plus in projected market value of fraudulent collectibles intercepted
- +45.3% year-on-year increase in all counterfeit cards; +5.1% for sports cards; +125% for Pokémon cards
- Counterfeit cards as a share of total submissions rose 250% — fraud is gaining ground inside the market, not just riding a growing one
- 70.1% of counterfeits were modern-era cards, 1990 to present
- PSA graded 285,000+ authentic copies of a single 2025 promo Pikachu — and was still submitted with 51 counterfeit examples of it in the same year
PSA earns from authentication, so the counts are its own, and the $200 million is a modelled estimate — Card Ladder prices valued at each card's average authentic grade — so read it as a floor. Its head of brand protection puts the trend plainly: counterfeiters target the $10 or $20 bill instead of the $100, because it slips through more easily.
A counterfeiter who can profitably make the cheap version of your product has already solved the hard part: your artwork, your packaging, your mould.
What this means for a brand owner
Dutch police data reported in September 2026 shows the scale of the same trade: over 3,500 fraud reports about trading cards in five years, 95% of them Pokémon, an average loss of around €415 per report, and roughly 80% of it through online marketplaces. One variant is a packaging lesson: re-sealing, where a rare card is pulled from an opened pack, replaced with a low-value card, and the pack closed again.
- Your reference sample is the weakest link. Verification that relies on someone comparing against memory fails against good copies. Verification that resolves against a record held elsewhere does not.
- The number on the label is not the identity. Any serial a customer can read must be bound to the physical unit by a third party, or it can be reprinted the way Curcio reprinted PSA's.
- Expect resale and re-sealing as the first attack surface, not the factory. If your packaging can be opened and closed without obvious damage, that is a decision you can make now.
Key takeaways
- Dutch customs seized 1,719,000 counterfeit Pokémon cards in Rotterdam — half a container, in 9,300 boxes.
- The cards looked genuine to the officer who found them; a specialist with a real card was needed to prove the difference.
- Counterfeit cards grew 45.3% in 2025 and Pokémon fakes 125%, with their share of submissions up 250%.
- Real grading labels were cleaned and reprinted with fake grades and serial numbers, defrauding buyers of over $2 million.