Lee Sang-hwa Pranked Husband Kangnam Over His 200-Million-Won Pokémon Cards

Retired speed-skating champion Lee Sang-hwa staged a hidden-camera prank on her husband, rapper Kangnam, convincing him that she had sold his entire Pokémon card collection for a fraction of its value. The stunt, uploaded to the YouTube channel Dongne Chingu Kangnam-i on the 15th under the title "I secretly sold Kangnam's Pokémon cards and made 200 million won," put a spotlight on a collection most viewers had no idea was worth that much.

How the prank came together

The setup had a real grievance at its core. Kangnam has a habit of buying Pokémon cards on every trip to Japan, and had at some point promised to stop. When the promises kept not sticking, Lee decided to act. She told the production crew she was going to "sell the cards" and began planning the prank in earnest.

The scale of what Kangnam had accumulated became clear once the crew started cataloguing it: three full drawers of cards, many of them still sealed in their original packaging. A visit to a card shop for a formal appraisal changed the tone of the segment quickly. Unopened boxes were priced between several hundred thousand won and around one million won each, with the most valuable sealed box appraised at roughly 2.3 million won. Individual cards pushed higher still: certain Pikachu cards exceeded ten million won, a Luigi Pikachu was valued at approximately 12.5 million won, and a 20th-anniversary commemorative Pikachu came in at around 15 million won. At least one card in the collection reached into the 20-million-won range.

The card shop's bulk purchase offer for the entire collection: about 200 million won.

The prank plays out

While Kangnam was out of the house, Lee had all the cards cleared away. When he returned and found them gone, he called her immediately. "Honey, where are the Pokémon cards?" he asked. She answered, calmly, that she had sold them.

Kangnam did not believe her at first. The moment Lee added that she had sold everything for two million won, his reaction shifted sharply. He began searching the house in visible disbelief, at one point dropping to his knees on the floor trying to find the missing cards. Told that a 200-million-won collection had gone for two million, he told Lee flatly: "That means you got scammed."

The reveal that it was all a hidden camera brought him visible relief. It also, almost as a side effect, gave his Pokémon collecting a kind of public validation: what he had described as a hobby turned out to be a significant asset. Kangnam and Lee Sang-hwa married in 2019.