X-Ray Specs: A Look Inside Trading Card Scalper Innovation

The perfect conditions for both pre-planned and opportunistic scalper attacks are quite simple: limited availability and high demand. The trading card culture – think everything from Pokémon and Magic the Gathering to Panini or Topps football and baseball cards – fuels this fire, with first print editions and special editions held to a higher value than reprints. By creating this value division through artificial scarcity, first prints and special card stocks like holographic or foil ‘shinies’ are more desirable for both fans and scalpers alike.  

This creates an arms race or a battle of ingenuity between scalpers and those who seek to disrupt them. In some cases, this is driven by regulation, ticket scalping for example is illegal (in some geographies), meaning anti-fraud and cyber professionals are compelled to prevent the activity. While most other kinds of scalping – think sneakers or trading cards – are not technically illegal, they do cause reputational damage among genuine fans and many leading original manufacturers now require that their retailers implement anti-scalping solutions or risk being cut off as a vendor.  

In terms of typologies, automated scalper attacks in the trading card market have sought to bypass digital queue systems and bulk buy drops of first edition cards, leaving fans empty handed or facing paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to secure a desirable first print card.  

But that’s just one technique. In 2025, scalper attacks in the trading card industry have become more sophisticated, even involving the purchase of X-ray machines specifically to target rare cards, which has led to an epidemic of ecommerce fraud in at least one leading retailer.  

Collectible scalpers turn to X-ray machines for pack scanning 

While securing a ‘rare’ card is an exciting and exclusive part of card trading, scalpers prey on collectors’ desires. Knowing they’d be willing to pay more for these cards, attackers have found a new way to ensure they only secure packs with ‘rare’ cards included – this way, no matter the release, they’re only paying for cards they can sell with an extortionate price margin. 

In what’s seen as an evolution of the pack weighing technique, where digital scales can reveal sealed packs that have premium cards in them – premium cards are slightly heavier – Netacea’s Threat Intel Center has been tracking a technique using X-ray machines to similar effect.  

In this typology, once attackers receive their bulk order of card packs, they’ll put the unopened packs through a desktop CT Scanner. A CT scanner, or computed tomography scanner, is a medical imaging machine that uses X-rays to create detailed cross-sectional images. Second hand or decommissioned micro or desktop scanners can be sourced from marketplaces like eBay for as little as a few thousand dollars.  

Given the profit margin on a single rare card sale can be multiple hundreds or even thousands, the outlay for this scalping typology is low and largely depends on some technical know-how. We are even aware of at least one industrial scanning operator in the US that has introduced trading card pack scanning as a service, meaning the process can be outsourced.  

 Once the scalper has identified the card packs with the rare editions, they return all the others to the retailer for a refund. This leaves genuine fans less likely to add a ‘rare’ edition to their deck and gives retailers a damaged reputation along with higher operational costs from managing large numbers of returns.  

The January 17 launch of the Pokémon TCG set, Prismatic Evolutions, was the most exciting (and hardest to get) release since 2023’s Pokémon 151, with part of its rise in popularity down to Pokémon TCG Pocket.  

Insights gathered from a Netacea customer – one of the largest retailers in the US and a major vendor of Pokémon cards – clearly reveal a parallel trend in scalping activity following the release of Prismatic Evolutions.  

Scalping activity tracked by Netacea’s Threat Intel Center – that is to say products sold by this retailer specifically being listed on secondary markets – spiked around January 20 as scalpers targeted the launch of the cards, surrounding merch, and past collections that they’d theorized would leap in value with their returned popularity. In the weeks that followed Pokémon scalped products outpaced all other scalped products at least twofold, with around 800 listings for scalped Pokémon products versus fewer than 400 listings for all other products.  

As reseller listings continued to spike with ‘Special Illustration Rares’ selling for around $2000 so too did the number of scalped listings, skyrocketing to over 2,000 by the last week of February.  

Although we don’t have access to the retailer’s internal data to see what the return rate is for scanned and returned card packs, we know anecdotally that the issue was so bad, that after working with our Threat Intel Center the retailer made the tough decision to stop taking returns on Pokémon items altogether.   

This is a clear example of how fraudulent activities, whether illegal or just unethical, always end up hurting the consumer and create tension between the retailer and their customer.  

Criminals leverage hustle culture to normalize retail fraud 

Riding the coat tails of hustle culture, organized criminal gangs are normalizing fraud. You only need to take a few swipes on TikTok before you’ll hit a video incentivizing ‘harmless’ tips or ‘hacks’ to ‘get rich quick’ alongside self-care routines and day in the life videos, which push a narrative that justifies digital shoplifting from large corporations. 

With dedicated reddit forums and publications tracking ‘chase cards’ and individual rare card prices within Pokémon products, this desensitized attitude is driving intense competition between scalpers and collectors that will overlook morality in a bid to catch ‘em all.  

Unfortunately for retailers, if they’re not proactively looking for scalping or other fraud typologies, a spike in returns might not be flagged for investigation among the other fires large-scale organizations are trying to combat every day. Fraud tends to be a lagging indicator and will more likely be identified a few months later when the commercial teams find anomalies on the balance sheet – and by this point, it’s too late.  

Work with master trainers to learn how to catch retail fraudsters 

Scalpers have become more than a nuisance for retailers worldwide as their techniques increase in sophistication, driving financial losses, operational costs, and reputational damage. Global companies make the headlines as true-intentioned fans, collectors and customers fail to make their desired purchase only to see the item available on another digital marketplace for double, triple (or sometimes more than 10x) the price. 

After helping our retail partner identify the rise in scalper attacks and confirming that over 70% of such attacks were related to Pokémon items, researchers in the Netacea Threat Intel Center infiltrated online forums to identify the return fraud typologies being used in relation to Pokémon cards, including the CT scanner approach. With this information we were able to help the US retailer find a solution that made them a less attractive target.