Mitch William Gross, a 34-year-old man from Earling, Iowa, is about to spend four months in federal prison for the crime of buying $145,000 worth of Pokémon cards and gaming items. The mistake he made was to buy them by defrauding the logistics company he worked for.
It’s a tale as old as time itself. Man works for transportation corporation, man uses company credit cards to buy tens of thousands of dollars on Pokémon cards, man falsifies receipts on expense reports to make the payments appear as regular business costs, man gets caught by the FBI and charged with wire fraud. We’ve all been there at one time or another.
Mitch William Gross managed to rack up an extraordinary $146,590.15 in fraudulent purchases, which the Southern District of Iowa’s Attorney’s Office said (thanks, KTIV) were spent on “prepaid gift cards, Pokémon cards, and gaming items.” He is then said to have “submitted falsified receipts and mischaracterized fraudulent charges on his expense reports so that the purchases appeared as legitimate business expenses.”
As a result of an investigation by the FBI and Des Moines Police Department, Gross has been ordered to repay the full amount of his elicit shopping, as well as serving four months in a federal prison, and three further years of post-release supervision. The report notes, “There is no parole in the federal system.”
As is all too often the case in these circumstances, we don’t have the key information: which Pokémon cards did he buy? Was this one big spend on a rare Charizard, or did he pick up a wealth of booster boxes? (The crimes all took place between September 2021 and October 2022, back in the glory days when you could buy Pokémon cards in stores.)
Gross pleaded guilty back in April, and was sentenced in the past couple of days. If he kept the Pokémon cards, he could sell them now four about five times whatever he paid.