텍사스 쓰레기통에서 발견된 10억 원 상당의 유언카

For the past month the story of a man who discovered almost a million dollars worth of rare trading cards in a Texas dumpster has enthralled a niche subset of the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game community. At the end of March, a man began to sell massive amounts of rare Yu-Gi-Oh cards online. He claimed he’d found them in the trash, but people in the community worried he’d stolen them. His posts on Facebook, TikTok, and eBay became erratic. He fought with people in the comments and said he’d made tens of thousands of dollars selling cards. Then his mom showed up on Facebook to defend him. The seller spoke with 404 Media on condition that we not use his name while he secures legal counsel. He referred to the cards as “thrown away” and said they were found in a dumpster as part of a security breach involving a contractor. He said it “involves 500,000 bulk cards (including high-value Caitlin Clark and [Quarter Century Rare] stock and 400+ factory uncut sheets.” The seller said that he’d “filed formal reports with Konami’s legal department regarding the contractor’s negligence.”He did not respond to follow-up questions. “The sale of uncut sheets is not allowed,” Konami, the company that owns Yu-Gi-Oh, told me in an email and did not respond to follow-up questions. 404 Media wasn’t able to confirm how the seller obtained them, but the uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, normally tightly controlled and highly valuable collector’s items, are real. It all started on March 23 with a weird listing on eBay for a rare uncut sheet of a Blue Eyes Silver Dragon Yu-Gi-Oh card . Uncut sheets are a rarity in card collecting. A printer typically prints out a massive sheet of cards and then cuts them to size before packing them to send to distributors. Mistakes happen. Sometimes printers misalign trays , cut the cards wrong, or put text in the wrong place . And sometimes uncut sheets of cards without errors also find their way to the market. The printer is supposed to destroy these mistakes, but some make it to market. When that happens they become collectors items worth thousands of dollars. Konami, the company behind Yu-Gi-Oh, controls the collector’s market on uncut sheets and gives out official 3x3 squares of them as prizes at tournaments . It’s strict about tracking down unofficially released uncut sheets and misprints and making sure the printer destroys them. It was shocking, then, when the listings hit eBay, TikTok, and several uncut sheet groups on Facebook at the end of March. Photos and videos showed hundreds of uncut sheets and misprints. There were Minecraft cards and basketball cards, but most of the sheets were Yu-Gi-Oh. There were rare foils (called starlights in Yu-Gi-Oh), misprinted sheets, and rare reprints of old cards. But the listings were odd. The pictures were often blurry and out of focus, the titles for the listings on eBay didn’t match what was being sold, and they were being sold for far less than they were worth. “Man I've made over $60,000 off these f****** Yu-Gi-Oh cards out of the trash I'm fixing to go take a video of where I got these hoes from and let you hold it on that now you all pay the premium price when I asked me post off at one at a time." “I actually purchased the first sheet that he had for sale,” ‘Nick’, a moderator for the Uncut Sheets Collectors Facebook group, told 404 Media. Nick spoke to us on the condition that we keep his anonymity because he says he has strict boundaries between his trading card life and a real world business he runs. “He listed a Yu-Gi-Oh sheet, Blue Eyes Silver Dragon, uncut sheet. The title, it didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t the actual sheet he was selling, but it was the only sheet he had up for sale,” Nick said. “He wanted $1,000 for it. And at that time, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really good deal for that sheet.’ So I instantly bought it. At the time, I assumed he had won it from a tournament. I assumed it was obtained legitimately.” Nick said that the man listing the sheets listed another uncut sheet the next day, also for $1,000, and he bought that one too. Nick assumed that the seller had more sheets and was just drip-feeding them onto auction sites so he sent him a message to find out how many were there. “This is when he divulges that he has hundreds of sheets,” Nick said. “I’m like, alright, I’ll believe it when I see it. I ask him to send me a video. He sends me a video and, yup, he has hundreds of Yu-Gi-Oh sheets.” Nick shared the video to the Uncut Sheets Collectors group. It showed the seller’s hand rifling through a large stack of uncut Yu-Gi-Oh sheets. “I’m still interested in the sheets, but once I saw the quantity that he has then it’s becoming more: ‘Well, he definitely didn’t get these from a legitimate source.’” Konami and other trading card game companies like Wizards of the Coast are aggressive about controlling the flow of cards. In 2023, Wizards—which publishes Magic: The Gathering—sent the Pinkerton detective agency to the home of a YouTuber who had acquired 22 boxes of cards from an unreleased set . Earlier in March, a brick and mortar store in Ohio called Table Top Gaming received a few hundred boxes of Yu-Gi-Oh cards from a distributor and found something strange inside. “The printing company packed the pallets with the test print sheets by mistake thinking they were just blank sheets. Pallets went to distro then me. I didn’t acquire them in any malicious way so I thought they were safe to sell, considered abandoned property because they were intended to be trashed,” Table Top Gaming owner Tyler Jedlicka told 404 Media. Jedlicka says he posted the test print sheets online and Konami contacted him. The company wanted the sheets back. Konami runs the official Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and angering them could mean hurting a brick and mortar business, no matter how rare and expensive a test print might be. “Once we confirmed in writing with [Konami] the blame isn’t put on us and that our status as an official tournament store won’t be affected we agreed to return them all,” Jedlicka said, adding that the whole thing was resolved without a major issue. So it’s odd that someone would be selling uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh cards online without interference from Konami. The seller’s videos and eBay listings were also odd and his behavior online seemed erratic. He’d post a listing and then delete it soon after. The pictures of the cards were often blurry and off-kilter. “You would think it would be worth the 2 minutes to make a proper listing. Just take a good, centered photo showing the whole thing front and back. That’s all he really had to do and he literally couldn't,” Nick said. At the end of March, the seller attempted to sell cards via an auction on TikTok live. The next day, he posted a Raffal link on his personal Facebook page. He wrote the “only way that I can legally get rid of my sheets is to raffle them off on Raffall.” Five days later he listed a rare card on eBay, then deleted it. Later he posted a picture of several single cards on his personal Facebook page then said they were for “local pickup only.” Nick did receive the sheets he’d bought, but said they arrived in poor condition and he made a few videos in the Uncut Sheets Collectors group letting them know to be wary of the seller’s cards. Nick said he thought that would be the end of it, but then the seller showed up in the comments. “I'm still going just got a whole another load of them guarantee you ain't nobody going to step up and say I stole them,” the seller said in one comment. “F****** stupid f*** I bet don't know you hoes getting none of this s***,” he said in another. In a third comment, he gave a clue to where he might have gotten the cards. “I got him [sic] out of the trash.” The seller insisted across multiple platforms in public posts that he’d found the cards in a dumpster. People in the Uncut Sheets group didn’t believe him and they peppered him with questions. Collectors began to snatch up his eBay list