Photo: Getty Images
The government didn't really mean for their COVID relief funds to pay for you rare Pokémon collection sir!
31-year-old Vinath Oudomsine from Dublin, GA, applied for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) for $85,000. He claimed his small business had 10 employees and he needed the assistance to keep his business afloat. Well... his business, it seems, was buying rare Pokémon for excessive amounts of money!
Oudomsine was convicted of misusing the loan money to buy a rare Charizard Pokémon card. The DOJ claims that he used $57,789 to buy a Charizard card, a first-edition, shadowless, and holographic Charizard card with a 9.5 gem mint rating, at the PWCC marketplace in December.
It'll now cost him even more money as U.S. district court judge Dudley H. Bowen ordered Oudomsine to pay $10,000 on top of the $85,000 in restitution and three years in prison. He will be on “supervised release” after the three years in prison. The Charizard card is now in the hands of the prosecutors. Oh the power they hold... if they we're 8-years-old and had friends who cared.
3 year without sex in prison.... oh, wait... he probably has spent the last 31 years without it, so shouldn't be hard.
Shockingly... the $57K isn't even nearly the most valuable Pokémon. Check this out: