Prices Rise, Scammers Rejoice

16.5 million reasons you just became a target

^{Rob Petrozzo, for Rally}

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In the wee hours of Monday morning, Logan Paul’s ultra-rare Pikachu Illustrator card sold at Goldin Auctions for $16.5 million, setting a new world record for the most expensive trading card ever sold. The headline itself was exactly what everyone involved is looking for in a sale like this - a rare one-of-few collectible that never comes to market, an outsized price, a bidding war happening live in the room with an unexpected winner, and a pop-culture celebrity at the center of it all. 

Paul originally acquired the card in 2021 for just over $5.2 million (we touched a bit on this a few weeks ago in this newsletter), and in those five years the value appreciation alone tells a story about the state of this market. Nostalgia, speculation, 1990s lore filling every ounce of open space for a new generation, and the growing belief that everything can and will be an asset class. 

But what’s maybe more notable about this sale than the number is the conversation it generated.

The sale price of $16.5M and just the word “Pokémon” are everywhere this week. By 8am the morning after the auction, it was on broadcast television, major social feeds, sports shows, finance blogs, and groupchats across continents. A trading card transcended its niche and became a free-floating symbol of a market environment in which inflated valuations have become accepted as normal.

There is no shame in recognizing that Paul’s personal brand and reach added jet fuel to the already extraordinary cultural weight of the 1-of-1 card. A pretty large section of the world woke up to that Pokémon conversation because someone with a massive platform made it a spectacle. Yet, that very visibility is the same catalyst that sets off a cycle as old as markets themselves: when prices rise rapidly and public attention follows, scammers awaken. They don’t get mobilized at the market bottoms - they thrive just over stage-left during its peak. 

So this week’s Shiny Thing$ isn’t by any means a “buyer beware” scare-tactic piece… but more some thoughts around what tends to happen when the bullhorns get sounded around an epic sale like this in an already rising market, and how to stay protected. 

Collectibles are now officially a financial market,
And financial markets are a target.

In logical terms, a scam of any kind presumes either an information asymmetry (the victim doesn’t know what the scammer knows) or an assumption of legitimacy (the victim assumes that because an idea is popular or something they’ve heard before, it must be real and legitimate). Classic finance offers a million different examples. The Ponzi scheme model that is now most closely associated with Bernie Madoff is the standard - paying old investors with new money while no underlying product is ever actually bought or sold (and usually never even existed in the first place).

But the more common bad actors you’re likely to see in the new finance landscape are typically “pump and dump” schemes that involve artificially inflating the price of a low-volume asset through exaggerated claims or coordinated buying, only to sell at an inflated retail-driven price and leave all the new investors holding the bag. The counter “short and distort” or spreading “FUD” as its known (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is the inverse tactic: creating negative rumors to drive a price down after inducing others to buy, profiting on the collapse. On the fringe of crypto and social media investing, the line between real viral enthusiasm and engineered hype is so thin that and so easy to confuse that both of these modern models of conning investors are usually invisible until it’s way too late.

The biggest problem in something like the collectibles market is that the scams become structural responses to an environment where asset prices are climbing, attention is abundant, and skepticism is in short supply. The type of environment in which the space is currently operating. 

Data from the FTC shows that consumer losses to fraud jumped to more than $12.5 billion in 2024, a 25% increase over the prior year, with investment scams alone accounting for $5.7 billion of those losses. The percentage of people who reported losing money to a fraud or scam also jumped double digits from 2023 to 2024, indicating not just more schemes, but more victims falling for them. Similarly, a 2025 survey by Pew Research Center found that online scams and attacks are now a near-universal experience, with tens of billions in losses reported to federal authorities (and thanks to AI, I’m more confident than ever that my generation of elder millennials is about to get absolutely hammered with indiscernible scams as we age). Not coincidentally, the stock market is up around 75% during that period starting in 2023 - one of the greatest bull-runs in our lifetime. Crypto has been institutionalized and turned into ETFs that anyone can invest in. Reddit is full of screenshots showing 20-somethings turning a $10,000 high interest loan into generational wealth through options trades. And now, rare trading card returns have officially eclipsed their 2021 highs that many thought would never be seen again. Fraud scales when markets are high and chaotic attention is everywhere. 

The psychological backdrop to all this is the same one that helps drive a $16.5 million price tag on a piece of cardboard.

It’s the story of fear of missing out, reinforced by nonstop social proof. The idea that if everyone else is talking about an asset, it must be worth owning. But just like any asset, quality matters over everything.

The rarest cards and collectibles have always been and always will be assets, in my opinion. But when prices rise dramatically even for those assets at the top end of the market, the “scarcity” selling point works its way into the sales pitch for investment opportunities built by people who have not done the real work and definitely have not put in their 10,000 hours. They start to speak to scarcity without actually understanding it. The more technology amplifies reach, the greater the potential audience that can be misled, misinformed, or enticed into believing the next big thing is just one click away.

Thats what to avoid, and thats why sometimes here at Rally we take time between IPOs and new opportunities. It’s not a smash-and-grab job acquiring the rarest assets, and it never should be. 

So what should we take from sensational headlines like this week’s card sale? First, the record price and global attention are a testament to how connected and liquid the markets for non-traditional assets have become, and how cultural narratives can drive economic outcomes in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. But second, such moments should remind us that spikes in public fascination also lead to spikes in vulnerability. When prices and attention are both high, the opportunists start showing up like a monorail salesman in Springfield.  

There’s a positive to all of this. The people, platforms, and products that were built for the long term and have created the trust throughout multiple market cycles (not just the happy times when the money feels free) are typically the ones that shine during these moments. In a world where rare artifacts command eye-watering prices and strangers on the internet can dictate the next hot asset, discernment isn’t just a virtue, it’s an absolute necessity. Rising prices are a celebration of demand, but also signal the arrival of scammers at the feast - which is as old as finance itself. Awareness of both the spectacle and the ugly shadows that come with it is how we navigate markets with clarity, and then move with conviction.

Stay vigilant. Stay informed. And remember, if it seems too good to be true, it almost always is. 

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Until Next Week…