Santa Ana police are investigating the theft of an estimated $963,000 worth of sports and Pokémon trading cards that were swiped from a FedEx truck outside the headquarters of a major card-grading company. Officers responded on October 13 to reports of a theft at Professional Sports Authenticator headquarters, in the 1600 block of East St. Andrew Place, where thieves made off with two full pallets of cards and disrupted a third before fleeing.
The incident, first reported by CBS News, put a jarring number on an already jittery Southern California collectibles market. Santa Ana police pegged the loss at roughly $963,000, though the force cautioned that an exact total could only be confirmed once the remaining boxes were scanned, according to nbcnews.com. That figure stands in contrast to initial headlines pegging the haul at $1 million, a number that outlets including Cardlines have described as speculative rather than confirmed.
As of the police department's statement, no arrests had been made and no stolen goods had been recovered, nbcnews.com reported. The stolen cargo included a mix of sports and Pokémon trading cards, many of them PSA-graded collectibles bound for owners who had paid to have their cards authenticated and encapsulated.
PSA Moves to Lock Down Stolen Certificates
PSA, which authenticates and grades collectibles and trading cards, said it has deactivated the certificates tied to the stolen items and alerted marketplace partners to be on the lookout for rare and serialized pieces that might surface for resale, per the same account from nbcnews.com. The company also said it is working closely with law enforcement and the carrier as the investigation continues, according to Mashable.
For customers whose submissions vanished with the shipment, PSA said its customer service team has reached out directly and is arranging compensation based on fair market value. One collector identified as SKY-B told Otia that his submission alone contained 104 cards and that the order's value exceeded $100,000, a reminder of how concentrated the financial risk can be when high-end collections travel together in a single shipment.
A Pattern of Card Thefts Across the Region
The Santa Ana theft lands amid a string of card-related break-ins across Southern California. CBS Los Angeles has reported that burglars have hit shops in Burbank, Anaheim, Brentwood and Simi Valley, with LA Sports Cards in Burbank alone losing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Pokémon and sports cards earlier this year. A separate burglary at a Pokémon card shop in the Pico-Robertson area involved three masked suspects and was over in under a minute, according to CBS Los Angeles.
Experts quoted by that station have described rare trading cards as having become the equivalent of luxury watches or jewelry to thieves, a shift that helps explain why a single truckload of slabbed cardboard can be worth nearly a million dollars. It is not the first time a FedEx shipment of cards has been targeted nationally: in 2024, a shipment of 54 vintage baseball cards valued at $2.1 million was stolen by a hotel employee after it was delivered to a Best Western in Strongsville, Ohio, for a sports card conference, per nbcnews.com.
Cargo Theft Losses Climbing Nationwide
The Santa Ana case also fits into a broader surge in cargo crime. According to CargoNet, estimated cargo-theft losses nationally jumped 60 percent to nearly $725 million in 2025, even as confirmed incidents rose a comparatively modest 18 percent, pushing the average value per theft up 36 percent to $273,990. California led all states with 1,218 supply-chain crime incidents that year, per CargoNet's data.
More recent figures suggest some cooling: CargoNet documented 677 cargo theft incidents across the United States and Canada in the second quarter of 2026, down 14 percent from the prior quarter and 26 percent from the same period in 2025. Even so, 2025's total of 3,594 supply-chain crime events was essentially flat compared with 3,607 in 2024, underscoring that high-value cargo like graded trading cards remains a persistent target for organized theft.
