Php 50,000 for a photocard?!

Last year, Filipino K-pop fans expressed their dismay to Kapuso mo Jessica Soho, a TV program of GMA, after the airing of their episode about a girl who stole 2 million pesos just to buy K-pop merchandise. In that episode, a photocard was shown that has a price of PHP 50,000, and some people, especially non-K-pop fans, thought that all of the photocards on the market had this kind of value. The result of this is that several fans are sadly losing their cherished belongings to theft due to false claims about the prices of photocards in the market.

The photocard featured in KMJS

A photocard is a special card that is usually included in merchandise packages, most frequently found in music albums and video CDs, and has exclusive selfies or photographs of K-pop group members. Sometimes, they'll be given out as pre-order perks or during fan gatherings. Which makes the photocard one of the most popular K-pop collectibles.

    

A quick backstory of the photocard shown in that episode is that it is from a member of the Korean boy group NCT named Jaehyun, and it is a rare photocard since they only have 500 copies of it and it was randomly inserted in the album Resonance. Let’s have this sample scenario of why it became a rare photocard: if the album has 700,000 copies, only 500 albums have a special yearbook photocard, which makes it a rare photocard since not all fans could pull this photocard unless they would buy hundreds of albums to try their luck or they would just buy online through people who buy and sell.

The girl in that episode also mentioned that the price range of a photocard was PHP 600–700. However, for a regular album photocard, it costs PHP 250–400 and there could be changes depending on how in demand or rare the photocard you’re trying to buy is. We just wanted to make it clear that not all photocards have thousands of values because some of them are freebies from a seller where you bought K-pop merchandise, and some of these are unofficial.

As a K-pop fan, we agree with other fans that, at some point, our safe place is ruined and our lives are put at risk because of the lack of misleading information about the photocards shown in that episode. However, the damage has been done, and we only get a statement that their purpose in airing that episode was for lessons and a warning not to cause harm to us K-pop fans. We hope that next time another story related to K-pop is to be featured, they will have proper understanding and research before airing an episode so that events won’t happen again.