Nintendo / Game Freak / Garigari-KunOh, dairy, it looks like someone got their hands stuck in the ice cream jar.
Takashi Ono, a 43-year-old Japanese man, was arrested today on suspicion of fraud after trying to win Pokémon cards by illegal means. A competition led by Japanese ice cream makers, Akagi Nyugyo Co., asked people to send winning ice cream cones from their Garigari-kun brand. The winning pallets are engraved “You win a Gari-Pokémon card” and the winners can send them back to the company to exchange them for rare Pokémon cards.
According to the Japan Times, Ono is suspected of forging 25 winning pallet poles in total. The company contacted police after suspecting so many single-person winning sticks. There are even reports of similar winning pallets being sold at auction sites for more than $ 500 (about £ 367), even though a box of ice cream costs just $ 3 (£ 2.20).
PokeGuardian story coverage states that at least one person had to open 41 boxes before finding it a luck stick: it looks like each box has 6 piglets, which means the odds of winning (at least for them) were around 1/246. This means that in order to find 25 sticks, Ono could have had to eat about 6,000 of the pineapple-flavored delicacies. Yes, we see why the company was suspicious.
All this for Pokémon cards? You better believe it. The winning sticks receive a limited edition Mythical Zarude card, as a link to the upcoming Pokémon movie, Secrets of the Jungle, which will be released in the West this year. The card sells for about $ 300 (£ 220). Here’s the bad guy himself:
© Pokémon / Nintendo / Creatures / Game FreakWould you pretend to have eaten thousands of frostbite for a potential profit? It’s this one cooler crime never committed, or the prettiest? Comment on your thoughts below in the comments.