Pokémon now wants your government ID before you can buy trading cards in Japan
Starting in August, buying Pokémon cards through the official Japanese online store requires scanning your national ID card. It’s an anti-scalping move, and it’s how bad the card shortage has gotten.
To buy Pokémon trading cards from the official Japanese online store, you now have to prove who you are with a government ID.
Starting in August 2026, The Pokémon Company is requiring buyers to authenticate purchases using their My Number Card, Japan’s national identity card. You scan the chip in the card with your phone through an external verification site to confirm you’re a real, single person.
It applies to online TCG sales, product lotteries, and registering for the right to enter events where these cards are sold.
Why Pokémon is checking IDs to sell cards
The reason is scalpers and bots, and the scale of the problem is genuinely absurd.
The Pokémon Company printed more than 10 billion trading cards between March 2025 and March 2026. Ten billion. And demand still outran supply, because automated bots buy up new product and restocks the instant they go live, leaving regular people with nothing.
Tying a purchase to a government ID is meant to break that. A bot can’t scan a My Number Card. One person gets one identity, and the account is locked to it, so the mass-buying that feeds the resale market gets a lot harder.
It’s the same fight playing out across collectibles right now, from Lorcana queues to Labubu restocks. Pokémon is just the biggest target, so it’s reaching for the bluntest tool.
The catch with the My Number Card plan
My Number Cards aren’t mandatory in Japan. Plenty of citizens don’t have one. And the cards take one to two months to be issued, which means anyone who wants to buy Pokémon product online and doesn’t already hold the ID could be locked out for weeks.
The Pokémon Company urged people to start registering now if they don’t have the card yet. The August timing of the announcement lines up with that one-to-two-month lead, which suggests they know a chunk of buyers will get caught flat-footed.
So the anti-scalping fix comes with a real cost to ordinary collectors, who now need a government ID in hand, issued weeks in advance, just to try to buy a booster box online.
What this means outside Japan
This is a Japan-only policy for now, tied to a Japan-only ID system. There’s no equivalent in the US, where the anti-bot tools are software-based, like the filtering the official Pokémon Center storefront uses.
But the underlying problem isn’t regional. American scalpers hit the same restocks, and Japanese-style Pokémon vending machines that came to the US got stripped by resellers fast enough that some were pulled from key locations.
Japan has a national ID system to bolt this onto. Most other markets don’t. So the fix Pokémon is reaching for here is one only Japan can really run, even though the scalping it’s aimed at is everywhere.
Ten billion cards a year, and it’s still not enough to outrun the bots. That’s the number to sit with.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
PocketMonsters.net (2026), verified for the My Number Card requirement starting August 2026, its application to online sales, lotteries, and event registration, and the official Japanese Pokémon Card Game site as the source
Sportskeeda (May 28, 2026), verified for the authentication process scanning the card chip via smartphone, the 10 billion cards printed from March 2025 to March 2026, the one-to-two-month issuance time, the non-mandatory status of the card, the Pokémon Center anti-bot software, and the US vending machine removals