When Pokemon Kill - Episode 2

Imagine opening the news and seeing this headline, man beaten a death with a bag of Pokemon cards. Now add in armored truck-style heists for Charizard, Yakuza laundering money through trading cards, people walking off cliffs chasing Pikachu, a bank robber who reformed his life just to come back years later by scamming fake graded Pokemon cards for millions, and what about Pokemon causing mass casualty incidents in their universe? This was supposed to be a kid's game. Welcome back to Crime is fine. Oh my gosh, we are already on episode 2. Pokemon kills. Well, maybe not all the time, but it has happened. Nintendo, don't you get mad at me? You're the ones that told a generation that it's okay for a small child to wonder into the woods one day with a fire breathing dragon in his pocket to pursue as much legal dog fighting as possible with strange adults. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my content, hi, I'm Donut. I've spent the past decade telling true crime stories. Before that, I spent a couple of years in the Navy, then a couple years as a cop. My main YouTube channel Donut Operator, which I still post to a couple times a week, has amassed 1.8 billion views with most of those being analytical breakdowns of police shooting people, or people shooting police. I don't encourage crime in any way, shape, or form, but you know dang well that listening to crime stories is kind of fun. No matter how gross they are. Yeah, what do you guys think about episode 1? People sue. Some might call that gallows humor and maybe even morbid curiosity. In the first responder world, we have a little saying, laughs so you don't cry. If you're a fan of laughing and not crying, you can watch your listen to crime as fun on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, or Pandora. Last episode went pretty hard. We talked about cartel executions, filling up morgues, and people in our own town selling cash for corpses. It was pretty gross, maggots, and people's bodies turning into soup gross. Also, apparently, it's pronounced heliscope. Sorry for the disrespect, CJNG. Please don't cut my face off and stitch it onto a soccer ball. You guys let me get away with pronouncing it like that the whole time. It's almost like I'm living with and marrying a Mexican in like four weeks, but for some reason, I didn't ask her for help pronouncing things, heliscope, hindsight is 2020. Anyways, why Pokemon this time? Well, mostly because I grew up on it, it's super popular, and there's actually a lot of crime involved in the franchise. Not necessarily directly from the franchise, like I'm not saying Game Freakin' Nintendo or doing drive-bys on the people who created Power World, although I bet they really want to. There's also a lot of crime in the Pokemon universe that you may not have noticed like war atrocities and prostitution rings. Let's get into it. When I was 11 years old, my father took me to a Sears in Marietta, Georgia. Some of y'all may remember Sears. It used to be one of those giant department stores attached to shopping malls until they all closed down due to bankruptcy in 2018. At one point, you could walk into a Sears and buy a new pair of jeans, a chainsaw, and a Game Boy, all in one trip. Up until 1988, you could even buy guns from there. Fun fact, before getting out of the firearm retail business, they had sold over 20 million firearms. Anyways, my dad and me stopped by the video game counter and I picked out Pokemon Blue for the Game Boy. Not the Game Boy Pocket or Game Boy Color mind you. I'm talking about the big gray brick with the green screen because it's all we could afford. I didn't put it down for months. Like every kid in the US, I was severely obsessed. A year later, the Pokemon Trading Guard game came out. And in just the first six weeks, they had sold over 400,000 booster packs and made 225 million dollars the first year from the cards alone. I remember it being so popular in schools they had to ban them for being so distracting. The Pokemon franchise has only gone up in popularity since its release. Just a couple of weeks ago, the YouTuber/Celebrity, Logan Paul sold the rarest card in the world for over $16 million US dollars. And where there's money, there's crime. That's what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk about people being lured to rare Pokemon and robbed. Berklery's becoming rampant due to the rising price of Pokemon cards. Without further ado, let's get into Episode 2 of Crime is Fun. Pokemon Kills. Let's dive into the pixelated nightmare that gripped the world in the summer of 2016. Pokemon Go. What started as a harmless augmented reality game that blended the real world with the digital monster hunt quickly became a magnet for muggings, stabbings, shootings, and senseless deaths. Pokemon Go had over 500 million downloads in its first year and made billions in revenue. You've never played it to give you kind of an idea of how it worked. You would fire up the app on your phone. Your screen overlays the camera view of your street, your backyard, or local park with cartoonish creatures. You might have Pikachu popping up by your mailbox, a squirtle lurking in the alley, maybe even a snorlax jill in your driveway. It was pretty fun. All my friends and I may or may not have played it on patrol when I was a cop. I mean you're driving around anyways, why not stop and grab that charizard when it's kind of slow on night shift. Not only that, but I kept tons of college kids from being mugged, stabbed, or worse. Most people around 20 years old have the self-preservation skills of a cabbage and I got to see it firsthand. There was a game mechanic that bad dudes put to use pretty quick. Seeing Pokemon Go, you have poke stops that are real-life landmarks in your town like churches, schools, town squares, parks, etc. People swarm the poke stops where you could find rare items or Pokemon. Muggers and other malicious types caught wind of this, but the problem was a lot of poke stops were super public. These bad dudes figured out that you could attract Pokemon using an in-game item called a lure. Bad dudes would take the lure and drop them in bad and are secluded parts of town. I spent weeks telling these kids to go the hell home when Pokemon Go first came out. No telling how many I kept from being shanked or having their booties touched without permission. There are some players though that weren't so lucky. Let's start an O-Fallen Missouri. It's around 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. This is four days after the game came out. Police get a call about a robbery and progress at a CVS parking lot. Officers roll up and spotted black BMW as they approach the occupants frantically try to toss a handgun out the window. It's too late, police surround the vehicle and detain the 14s inside. All were ages 16 to 18. Police quickly connected them to a string of similar armed robberies across St. Louis and St. Charles counties. The adult suspects face first-degree robbery charges with a bell set at $100,000 cash each. Turns out they had been using this Pokemon Go tactic all week. These incidents spread like wildfire. In the UK alone there were 290 incidents in just July 2016 across 29 police forces. There were phone snatching robberies using Pokemon lures and sorry they had a huge brawl involving 30 players. Oh and let's not forget tons of trespassing. People were so distracted with catching Pokemon they just walked wherever they all they wanted to. Cops caught one guy luring kids into his home because he said he had lots of Pokemon inside. One woman kept calling the police because she was scared that the Pokemon, not the players, might try to break into her home. By the end of its first frenzied summer in 2016, the app had been linked to at least 25 documented direct debts worldwide according to dedicated trackers. Plus an estimated 256 fatalities in the United States alone from distracted driving crashes in the first 148 days. A study pegged the economic damage between 2 billion and 7.3 billion dollars from Pokemon Go. You're probably wondering about the murders though. One of the most prolific was 20 year old Calvin Reilly a month after the game was released. The promising young college basketball player was checking out a popular polka stop right on the San Francisco waterfront without a know where he was ambushed. A gunman fired several shots into Reilly's back and then just ran off. Despite a thorough investigation the killer was never found. FBI released a new sketch of the suspect nine years after the murder still hoping to figure out who and why they had blasted a random college kid playing Pokemon. Same thing happened just a couple of days after the release of Pokemon Go in Guatemala. An 18 year old man and his cousin were looking for Pokemon when they were ambushed by robbers who were waiting at a polka stop. That same week in Australia a woman was staring at her phone when his stolen car blew a light and killed her. Turns out natural terrain was one of the biggest killers for young Pokemon trainers. There were dozens of incidents that people just walking off cliffs or stepping on a snake. Speaking of cops playing Pokemon Go, most of us were smart enough to only do it on slow nights and we still answered our radios. These two Los Angeles police department cops though not so much. This incident happened in April of 2017 in the cringe show area right in the middle of a busy night shift. If you live in Los Angeles or California in general you've probably heard of how bad cringe show it is. There's a lot of crime there. It's not really the place you want to ignore your fellow officers when they're calling for backup. Especially with the chances of being a victim of a violent crime in cringe is 297% higher than the national average in some estimates. So a macy's at the mall is getting robbed in their multiple suspects. It's a whole robbery in progress. The captain of these two officers is on the radio screaming for backup. These two are literally parked less than 200 yards away from the robbery. Instead of rolling up though they straight up said screw it on the dash cam and go hunting for a rare snorlax that just popped up a few blocks over. You can hear the audio clears day. One of them goes I don't want to be his help. Then they're driving around arguing on how to catch the snorlax. They're talking about Topic battles and one says the guys are gonna be so so jealous when they finally snag a snorlax. The sergeants blowing them up on the radio now too, and it's zero response. The supervisors are wondering what the hell is going on, so they later review the footage and go, "Yeah, they heard it, they just didn't care." Of course, internal affairs hits them and they lie through their teeth. They claim they never heard the calls, where they weren't playing the game, even though the dashcam hasn't talking about it for 20 minutes. They try to say they were doing extra patrol or monitoring a mythical creature for social media. Disciplinary boards unanimously say, "Hey, you're fired." In 2018, both of them were gone. They appealed it all the way up, and in 2022, a California Pills court tells them, "No, you're done." LAPD even dropped the full dashcam video in 2023, so the whole world to watch these two cops choose Pikachu over public safety. The moral of the story is if you're going to catch them all on the clock, at least don't get caught on your own dashcam ignoring a robbery. We spent the entire episode so far cataloging the tragedies. The Muggings, the shootings, the distracted drivers who never made it home. But amid the summer of 2016's chaos, there was a couple of bright spots. There was a moment when the game didn't deliver a death, but helped prevent it. Or at least helped put a dangerous dude behind bars. Two Marines were walking around the first week of release, catching some Pokemans when they looked up and saw a homeless dude harassing a mom and her three children. Dude was getting too close, touching the kids inappropriately, and just making them uncomfortable in general. The two young Marines watched over this creep until the police arrived. Police discovered he had a couple of warrants out for his rest, one of them being attempted murder. Cops took him in for a couple of warrants and molestation charges because of how he was touching the kids. There were certainly some problems, but since the early days of Pokemon Go, the developers had put in certain safety measures, like not allowing you to play above a certain speed limit. So they basically cut down on some of those traffic deaths. More of the story, if you're going to be playing that game, stay strapped or at least keep your head on a swivel. The mobile game can be pretty dangerous if you're not careful, but what about the trading card game? Let's talk about the blood money off of the Pokemon trading card game. Your parents may tell you Pokemon cards don't kill, but a guy actually got beat to death with some. We'll get there, but first, did you know that since being created in '96, the card game alone has grossed $30 billion, and what happens with any industry worth $30 billion? There's a criminal underworld of armored heist, stabbings, shootings, burglaries, and counterfeit empires worth millions. A first-edition charge art holographic confets $200,000 plus at auction. A first-edition, sealed booster box, well over $100,000. With the post-COVID boom, $11.9 million card shipped in fiscal year of 2023-24 alone. These aren't just toys, they're liquid ass sets, they're portable little gold nuggets drawing thieves like Team Rocket to a master ball. Cops now call Pokemon cards the new cocaine of retail crime. They're easy to fence on eBay, discord, or black market apps. And they are dang near impossible to trace. One of the craziest oceans 11 poke heists just happened, fresh off the press in February of 2026. Was that a store called Do We Collectibles in Anaheim, California? An electronic repair shop that started slinging Pokemon cards on the side back in 2023. It's been hit twice now, once last June, and then bam, round two just hit super hard. So it's early morning around 3 a.m. on February 18th, four suspects roll up. They don't smash the front door like a bunch of amateurs, no, they go into full heist mode. First they smash the glass door of the neighboring insurance office, then they grab a sledgehammer and start pounding through the shared drywall. Surveillance video that was released by the shop itself shows these mass dudes carving out a big hole climbing through like rats in a wall and popping into the card shop. They were in and out in 10 minutes. They shattered display cases and grabbed hundreds of cards, mostly smaller singles that add up quick, plus some high value graded stuff, including at least $110,000 card. The total haul was roughly $180,000 in Pokemon cards and other collectibles. They dip out, pile into a dark colored sedan, and vanish. One dumb dumb does drop his cell phone climbing through the hole, so cops have that one lead. We'll see what happens. This one is a smash and grab chaos, this is planned. They bypass the Lawrence by going sideways through the wall instead of the front. Kind of tells you how desperate and organized these crews are getting. Pokemon cards aren't just kid stuff anymore, they're worth more than some people's cars or even houses. And thieves know it. If you're running a shop in SoCal or even carrying a fat stack to a trade meek, keep that head on a swivel, next time it might not be drywall they're coming through. You're not even safe walking down the road now with your collection. Within a month of that burglary we just talked about happening, there were two huge robberies only a couple miles away. And Los Angeles, a dude, was coming out of a collectible store with $200,000 in cards on him. For some reason, I don't know why he's walking down the road with that. Another dude with a gun, walked up, took him all off of him. They still haven't found that suspect. Right down the road from that one, Los Angeles again about a month before that, there's a guy walking around with a briefcase, and inside was $300,000 worth of cards. These followed him into a parking lot and relieved him of his property also. Guys, what are you doing walking around with 300 grand in Pokemon cards? My home state of Texas got slammed too. Right here in my home backyard, the Houston area turned into ground zero for Pokemon card thefts. Late 2026, we're talking about break ins, home invasions, all sorts of nefarious stuff targeting collectors and shops like its open season. Take this poor guy in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston. Man's planning on opening his own collectible store and he stocks up on hundreds of sealed prismatic evolution booster boxes. Each box is running about $85 to $90 retail and way more on the aftermarket. He goes away for whatever for a couple days and burglars kick in his door, home invasions style, completely cleaning out his card storage. Nothing else in the home was touched other than the Pokemon cards. The total loss was over $55,000 in Pokemon product. Fox 26 got the store and surveillance footage shows the aftermath. Empty shelves kicked in door in the guys' dreams of owning a shop delayed. He told the reporter that he's gutted that was an entire startup inventory, thieves knew exactly what they were after. They probably cased him online through local groups or hell, probably even knew him personally from a card store. Then flip over to Cyprus on the west side of Houston. REV collectibles get hit twice in the holiday season alone. First break ends mid-December, then boom, round two right after. Surveillance video that the owner posted shows two masked guys slipping in after hours and grabbing high-end stuff like Charizard Ultra Premium collections, Pokemon Centri Elite Trainer boxes and sealed packs. And of course, a bunch of high-graded ultra rare singles. Harris County Sheriff's Office picks the combined losses at around $30,000. Turns out it was the same two suspects both times per the Sheriff's Department. This is an isolated Houston PD and Harris County are linking a string at least four collectible shop hits in recent months. Katie Cyprus and Richmond were they cut through a wall like an Anaheim. Pokemon's the start target because it's portable, untraceable, once fenced, and exploding in price with the new sets. Now San Antonio might be quiet for now. No one's tunneling into the local GameStop yet, but I'm not far from Houston and boy to the kids here loved steel stuff. I'm looking at you Adgers, you can't keep your hands off valuable stuff. If you're carrying a fat binder to a trade meetup, heading to a card show, or just got a fresh prismatic haul in your truck, keep it lowkey guys. Don't flash that Charizard binder in a parking lot. Don't post your collection on every Facebook group, maybe invest in a safe, or an alarm. I've seen enough property crimes on patrol to know. Opportunists watch for these shiny stuff, quite literally in this situation. I think one of the more violent Poke robberies I've seen just happened to in January in New York. If so, Cal and Texas weren't bad enough, the crime wave hit Manhattan Hard. A fancy 2,000 square foot joint called Poke Court that selling rare cards, accessories, and even Pokemon inspired lifestyle stuff were hosting a community event. There were dozens of collectors, fans and employees packed in at around 6.45 pm on January 14th. It was supposed to just be a wholesome trainer meetup until three masked hooded guys burst in wearing anime-themed backpacks like their cosplaying villains. Surveillance video released everywhere from ABC7 to BBC shows one guy pulls a handgun and points it right at terrified shoppers and stuff. This is with over 50 people packing the place. The other thieves start smashing glass displays with hammers, the yelling threats and ransacking the rare single section. Hold things over in three minutes and they grab more than $100,000 to $120,000 worth of merchandise including cards dating back to $99, including a first edition charge art worth $15,000 plus others like a $5,500 and a $3,500 single. They also snag a thousand in cash from the register and a cell phone from a 27 year old female customer. No one got shot, thank god, but victims were pretty shaken up. People thought they were getting Pikachu, but they got Glocka Choo. Thought they were getting Bulbasaur, but they got Blikkiasaur. Match up, but they got the match hopper. Alright, final stop, I'll stop. NYPD is still hunting the trio with no arrests yet, but footage is clear. They're hooded, armed and out fast. But cause this robbery blew up in the news, the Poke court even got hit with extra drama later. Nintendo reached out about the name in logo because it was too close to Pokemon so they rebranded it to the trainer court. Talk about adding insult to injury, they got robbed and then immediately got a season to assist from Nintendo. Robberies and smashing grabs happen all the time, but let me tell you an insane story about a former bank robber who became one of the most successful card scammers ever. Picture this, September 2008, the financial crisis exploding, banks are failing, the 28 year old guy named Anthony Curcio is a former standout football player from Monroe High School in Washington. He's landscaping outside of the federal courthouse in Seattle when he spots something that changes everything. There's a brink armored truck making routine cash drops at a brink of America branch. He becomes obsessed with making more money, so for months he stakes it out. He studies police response times. He maps escape routes. He even dredges a local creek by hand to make sure his plan would work. This next part is pretty damn clever. The Day of the Highest Curseo of Post-Fake Craigslist ads for road work. He's telling applicants to show up in reflective vests and blue shirts. Why though? Oh, he's creating confusion because he shows up dressed the exact same. He pepper sprays the guard at the bank, grabs two bags, stuffed with nearly 400K in cash and takes off running. But here's the genius or insane part or both. He sprints over to Woods Creek, hops in a yellow inner tube he'd rigged with a cable pulley system. He tried to jet ski first, but rocks ruined that idea. But he uses this cable pulley system to pull himself upstream against the current to get away car waiting on the other side. Dude just vanishes into the woods. Turns out though, his crazy and well thought out as the plan was, one random homeless guy at the side of the river saw the whole inner tube contraption, so police tracked him down. Curseo gets six years in federal prison. While inside he seems to turn his life around, he writes children's books. The books are about making good life choices. He starts speaking to kids about addiction and crime prevention. He's doing these Ted Talk style talks, YouTube videos, media spots on Fox, NPR. He's even on 2020. He coaches youth sports, builds a redemption arc. He tells his audience don't make my mistake. Millions watches content. He looks like the poster boy for second chances. Fast forward to the Pokemon boom of the early 2020s, cards are exploding in value, holographic first edition cards are fetching tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, grading services like PSA become the gold standard. A 10 Jim Mint card can multiply its price overnight sometimes 20 fold. My buddy King Trout just made a great video here on YouTube about the grading services for cards. Check that out. So this guy, Curseo, he's in his 40s now. He's out of prison. He's living in Rebman, Washington. He sees an opportunity. Not the legit kind. From at least 2022 through May 2024, prosecutors say Curseo and his partner ran a nationwide wire fraud scheme. They took real cards which were often low grade or ungraded Pokemon classics from 99 and forged PSA labels. They'd scrub real serial numbers off genuine PSA slabs, print fake hygrids like 9s and 10s worth thousands in case the cards in temper resist at holders and sell them online at massively inflated prices. They just thought they were getting pristine gems when they were getting Dr. Junk worth as much as the tiny piece of cardboard it was printed on. They used fake identities to dodge detection. They would use names like Brendan Wooley or John Steele. They moved products across the country, raking in over $2 million before the feds caught up. The big sting that did them in was an undercover fed pretending to be a buyer. The fed buys a fake 99 holographic Venusaur for $10,500 and wired money straight to Curseo's account. In January 2026, a Manhattan jury convicts them on conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud after just 4 hours of deliberation. Him and his partner receive a max sentence of 20 years apiece. What about organized Pokemon crime? Well since Pokemon was born in Japan and so were the Yukuza, you know they gotta have a hand in it too. Reports from late 2024 into 2025 say Yukuza groups buy rare cards with dirty cash. Cash light from fraud are selling drugs. They can easily stash 'em cause they're tiny and portable, then flip 'em overseas for clean money. One ex syndicate head told Japanese media they use cards to smuggle millions of broad. They're easy to hide in luggage, there's no bank trails, some estimates put it at over 40 million laundered that way, with raids nabbing 27 of its members. It's a possibility that you're gonna get robbed while carrying super expensive Pokemon cards worth more than the house I grew up in. It's a possibility that if you're staring at your phone, trying to catch cartoon animals and not paying attention, that city bus might turn you into a meat crayon, final destination style. Turns out while the possibility of being beat to death with Pokemon product is low, it still has happened. August 2nd, 2022, South Yorkshire, England. You know that one place where you can be arrested for being a meanie head on the internet. I'm pretty sure I just saw a guy arrested two weeks ago in England for littering because a leaf flew in his mouth so he spit it out on the ground. I mean that might be an urban legend, but I could definitely see it happening over there. There was a quiet residential street lined with low rise flats, nothing special, ordinary people living ordinary lives, 31 year old Andrew Hague lived in one of those flats. He had a history of "psychotic disorders". Reports say he stopped taking his prescribed medication and was heavily abusing the devil's lettuce. Let me put my dad cap on for a second and learn you young folks something real quick. Can the wackies tobacco be fun for some people? Sometimes it makes them incredibly paranoid, but when used in adolescence it can increase your chances of developing schizophrenia two to four times. If you already have schizophrenia like the guy we're talking about in England, THC makes symptoms much worse. His neighbor, 50 year old Simon Wilkinson, lived just down the hall. They weren't close but they weren't really strangers either. One summer evening, something snapped. Witnesses later tell police they heard shouting, "The young crazy guy Andrew stormed out with his flat, furious about something." He confronted the older dude Wilkinson outside the building and yelled, "Come out here and fight me like a man." Wilkinson stepped outside and some ugly words were exchanged. Some reports say Wilkinson called Andrew a "nots". That means a child predator of some sort. Other reports mention racial slurs, whatever was said it lit the fuse. Andrew grabbed a heavy bag which reports say contained four or five metal tins that were stuffed with Pokemon cards and swung it like a club. Witnesses describe Hague hitting Wilkinson repeatedly with ferocious force. He said it was like a crickety or swinging for the boundary. Our in freedom terms, a strong American man swinging a baseball bat. Simon Wilkinson ended up collapsing into a pool of blood. He had severe head and facial injuries and he never regained consciousness. Paramedics arrived but who's pronounced dead at the scene. Hague fled the scene but didn't get too far, police arrested him within a couple hours. He admitted to the attack and said he viewed it as an act of mercy. In his deluded psychotic state, he believed Wilkinson was suffering or that death was kinder than letting him live. So yeah, he beat him to death with Pokemon cards and ended up catching a lie sentence with a minimum turn of 17 years. Before parole eligibility. Speaking of crazy, have you seen how bad the Pokemon card scalpers have gotten? People are going to stores like Target and buying every single Pokemon card before anyone else can get one booster pack. Some scalpers even have been caught putting Apple air tag trackers under Walmart or Target Vendors cars, hidden on the bumper in the will well, just somewhere to track them via the app to every store drop. Yes, scalpers are tracking distributors. Some people have even been reported to bribe store employees to tell them when the next shipments come in. They show up minutes before shelves get filled, Pokemon cards snag everything and flip it online. Witnesses say groups coordinate this like a professional heist. They got vans waiting and they're all coordinating restocks as a total ambush. Their behavior kind of makes you want to hit them with a bag full of Pokemon cards, I tell you what. Being as helped calls such a high demand, it's fueled a lot of these robberies we've been talking about. It's not illegal to be a scalper in most cases, it's kind of lame being a grown-ass man fighting children over Pokemon cards. You know what's not illegal, taking a scalper's cards out of their shopping cart and target or running to check out and buying it yourself. Like I was saying earlier, anything bringing in money is going to cause a little bit of crime here and there. But have you ever considered the crime actually inside of the universe of Pokemon? Like actually in the Pokemon world, maybe even war crimes inside of the Pokemon world? I had a lot of fun researching this and coming up with wild ways that Pokemon could kill other human beings. So listen here, we're talking about the Pokeverse. I had to throw this segment in here because it's always been on my mind, honestly. Hear me out. It gets kind of crazy/hilarious. I remember playing Pokemon Blue on my Game Boy when I was 10 and even thinking, "Wait, they let this main character, a 10-year-old kid named Ash, go run into a forest by himself to challenge strange adults to dogfights?" That's wild behavior. My parents wouldn't trust me with a magnifying glass because I kept setting pine cones on fire in the playground. Let alone trust me with a dragon that breeds fire. Or a yellow rat that can electrocute things. This main character, Ash, had no phone, no GPS, no parental supervision. Just forest full of venomous bugs, psychic horrors that drag children to the afterlife, and an international crime syndicate called Team Rocket kidnapping anything that moves. Dude, Team Rocket, I mean, it's basically the Poke Mafia ran by a cadding Giovanni. He tried to drown Asher to submarine in episode 2 of the show. So a small list of crimes Team Rocket has committed over the years. Pokemon theft/poaching, extortion, hostage taking, sabotaging public facilities like Power Plants, which is a huge federal crime, destruction of property, illegal experiments on animals, animal cruelty, including slicing off Pokemon parts for resale and killing Pokemon with Stumbatons, they even run casinos to launder money from their criminal Pokemon Empire. On top of what we know, Team Rocket traffic's Pokemon constantly by stealing, kidnapping, and selling them. I don't even want to think about the idea of illegal Pokemon prostitution rings. I've seen what you dirty birds on reddit say about certain ones. You got Machamp out here with four arms looking like a bodybuilder, jinx with the guac guac 3000 lip fillers, and that's just the ones from the original 151 that I can remember. Remember, I don't even know what the other 3,000 Pokemon look like now. Okay, I take that back while riding this I did some research and I'm really sorry that I did. There's one called Guard of War that's described as a bipedal humanoid Pokemon with an elegant, graceful design resembling a woman in a flowing gown or dress. Reddit often calls this one "wifew material." Not my words, that's the internet saying that. And that's too much Reddit for today. I'm just saying Diglett looks like a weiner and did O can turn into any other living creature. Food for thought. Okay enough of that, let's talk about cool stuff like war crimes. My friend, the Fat Electrician likes to say it's not a war crime the first time. And Lord, these Pokemon could really get down in war if they wanted to. In the original Pokemon games, there's only one mention of warfare. When you talk to Lieutenant Surge, the gem leader of Vermilion City, he straight up says, "I like to zap my enemies in war." This meaning that, A, humans in the Pokemon universe do go to war, and B, they use Pokemon attacks on other humans. If you're familiar with the Pokemon world, you know there are some scary attacks out there. There better be some type of Poke Geneva conventions if that's the case. I mean, there are attacks like poison gas, combine that with a flying Pokemon, and you got these cute creatures committing chemical/biological warfare from the sky. Speaking of chemical/biological warfare, the attack sludge bomb is basically a dirty bomb. I could see Poke Terror setting that off in largely populated areas. That are a poison type Pokemon just eating themselves into a city's water supply. What I'm saying are Pokemon would be incredible at causing mass casualty incidents. The most powerful attack in the game is literally just called explosion. Guess what that does? Explosion is not to be confused with the self-destructibility though, which is mostly used in those sandy desert environments. Oh, and the most powerful flame attacks are freaking brutal. There are a couple of Pokemon weighing 2 pounds. They can wipe out an entire village. Heck, there's even one Pokemon attack called stillbeam. It's just a sniper rifle. I wonder what the ballistic rating of that thing has on a human skull. It's like, hey, geodude, turn that guy at 2,000 meters 3 o'clock into pink mist. That's just one of the direct fire abilities. They also have stuff like laser beams, solar beams, psychic beams, ice beams, all sorts of stuff to make the enemy unhappy. Just use your imagination on this one. I hope you guys are enjoying this donut hole. You seem to like the ADD brakes in the first episode. Speaking of snipers, I didn't know these new generations of Pokemon created perfect assassins. There's a bird-looking critter named decidui. He can camouflage, fly, and shoot quills from his wings. More specifically, according to the Pokemon Wikipedia, it takes only a tenth of a second for it to pluck, aim, and fire an arrow quill from its wings. It is not only quick but also accurate, capable of striking targets over half a mile away. Some of the best snipers in the world can't make that shot. That guy isn't even the scary one. There's one called Intellion. Let me describe his little ass real quick. It has darkly colored, nic-detating membranes that allow it to analyze for an opponent's weak point. These special lenses can also detect body heat. That's right, it's got built-in thermal optics. Once Intellion finds a foes weakness, it will start attacking. This also helps it precisely shoot water from its fingertips at Mach 3. That's off in the Wikipedia. Mach 3 is 3,400 feet per second, by the way. That's the speedier basic 556 rounds shot from an AR-15. Not only that, the bullets that it shoots are water, so yeah, it's untraceable back to the shooter. But wait, there's more. The membrane in its back is extendable and allows it to glide in the air. The blue streak on its tail hides sharp, retractable frills, which it uses similarly to a knife. That's right, it has built-in knives for close-quarter battle. It can fly. It can camouflage itself. It's got guns that shoot water jets on its fingertips. And don't get me started on some of the psychic attacks. Some of these critters can straight up control your mind with hypnosis. Think of a Pokemon making a random dude go shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Launching the Pokeverse into World War I. Are the psychic shift ability that turns friend and a foe? Parachute some Pokemon that know that skill onto an unsuspecting army and watch them tear themselves to pieces. The freezing glare ability just freezes you in place. Imagine a group of enemies rushing your machine gun to ask and right when they're in range. Boom! Cast freezing glare and let the M249s do the rest. Anyway, did you get my drift? There are an endless number of ways a Pokemon could be used to murder human beings. So there you have it folks. The Pokemon universe is way darker than the bright colors and catchy theme songlet home. From a 10-year-old kid wandering unsupervised into forests full of literal nightmare monsters and full-blown crime syndicates trying to down him in episode two, two real-world tragedies where distracted trainers got robbed, shot, or turned into vehicle-related death statistics during the Pokemon Go frenzy of 2016. We talked about the card game turning into a criminal magnet. Smashing grabs worth hundreds of thousands, ecuses laundering dirty money through portable Pikachu's, scalpers turning restocks into heist with air tags and bribes, and even a reformed bank robber like Anthony Curcio flipping fake PSA-graded cards from millions before the fed slapped him with 20 years. And don't get me started on the in-universe stuff again. There are infinite criminal possibilities out there. At the end of the day, Pokemon started as innocent fun, a Game Boy brick that hooked a generation to be included. Back at that seers in Marietta, Georgia. But money, obsession, and human nature have a way of twisting even the purest thing into something dangerous. Whether it's a lore drawing you into a bad spot or rare card making you a target, or just the wild lore where cute critters commit felonies, the lessons the same. Pokemon kill. I just love saying that. Stay strapped, keep your head on a swivel, don't flash your charizard and sketchy parking lots, and maybe don't swing a bag full of metal tins full of cards at your neighbor. No matter how psychotic the devil's lettuce makes you. Thank you for hanging out on episode 2 of Crime is Fun, Pokemon Kills. If you laughed instead of cried, hit that subscribe button, leave a review, tell a friend, and follow me on YouTube or any of your favorite podcast streaming services. Until next time, trainers, catch em all, responsibly. And remember, laugh so you don't cry. Stay safe out there, don't na na na na. [BLANK_AUDIO]