Pokemon Center orders cancelled after a shipping company was hacked
Customers of the official Pokemon store in the United Kingdom and Germany had details exposed and orders cancelled. The breach happened at CEVA Logistics, the shipping firm, and it also hit Steam hardware buyers in Europe.
Pokemon Center, the official Pokemon store, has cancelled orders in the United Kingdom and Germany after customer details were exposed in a hack. Dexerto reports a large number of cancelled orders. Eurogamer reports the breach did not happen at Pokemon Center at all.
It happened at CEVA Logistics, a shipping company. Per Eurogamer, CEVA told Valve days earlier that the same hack affected people who bought Steam hardware in Europe. CEVA has now notified Pokemon Center that some of its customers are caught up in it too.
The part that is easy to miss
The store was not hacked. The company that moves the parcels was.
That distinction matters, and not because it lets anyone off the hook. A shop you buy from hands your name, your address and your phone number to whoever delivers the box. That data lives in a second company's systems, under a second company's security, and you never agreed to anything with them directly.
So a single break-in at a delivery firm reaches customers of businesses that have nothing to do with each other. A Pokemon plush and a piece of Steam hardware have nothing in common except the truck.
What we know, and what we do not
Here is the honest state of it:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who was breached | CEVA Logistics, per Eurogamer |
| Which Pokemon customers | The United Kingdom and Germany |
| What happened to orders | Cancelled, per Dexerto |
| Exactly what data was taken | Not stated in the reports we have |
| How many people | Not stated |
| Whether United States customers are affected | Not stated |
That last row is the one American readers will want, and we cannot fill it in. Neither report says anything about the United States store. We are not going to assume it is fine and we are not going to claim it is not. If that changes, this page gets updated.
If you ordered from the affected stores
Some general advice that holds after any breach of a shipping firm, whoever it happened to:
- Watch for a refund. A cancelled order should come back to your card. Check that it actually did.
- Expect fakes. Scam emails and texts get much easier to write when someone knows you ordered something and knows what it was. A message about a "failed delivery" that asks for a small fee or your card details is the classic version.
- Do not follow links in delivery messages. Open the store or the courier's own site yourself and check the order there.
- Read the official notice when it lands. Companies are usually required to tell affected customers directly. That letter, not a social media post, is where the specifics live.
Why this keeps happening to game stores
Nothing here is unique to Pokemon. Retail runs on a small number of shared logistics providers, so one of them getting hit produces a list of victims that spans unrelated brands.
For a company like The Pokemon Company, the reputational cost lands anyway. Shoppers do not think about supply chains. They think about the store that took their money and then cancelled the order.
The timing is also unhelpful. Pre-orders for the 30th Celebration card set are live on Pokemon Center, with the set out worldwide on September 16. Anything that shakes confidence in the official store during a pre-order window is a problem the store has to actively fix. If you have money committed there, keep an eye on your order status over the next few weeks.