Facing the same deranged and often violent market for their products in the US, the Japanese wing of the Pokemon Company last week announced that their stores in the fictional cartoon fighting animal brand will now employ facial recognition technology in order to throttle the rampant scalping of new releases in the Pokemon Trading Card game, Kotaku reports. “To ensure compliance with appropriate entry and purchase rules, we will be using a facial recognition system to verify the identity of customers aged elementary school age and older when they enter the store and receive their numbered tickets,” the company said in announcement, the “tickets” being a voucher that allows the bearer to actually purchase a box of the increasingly expensive collector-sought cards.
This is on top of the May policy announcement that buyers will need to present a Japanese government-issued ID to buy certain cards and/or enter the “lottery” to get the chance to buy other certain cards or boxed collections ahead of their releases to the company-owned retail stores.
It’s not clear when the new GOP line will be “You need to show a photo ID to buy Pokemon cards in Japan, therefore you should have to show it when you vote in American elections.”