Kent Kubasta, 72, of Medina, Ohio, entered a no-contest plea to illegally placing a GPS tracker on a delivery driver’s vehicle to learn where and when Pokémon card deliveries were being made. A Wayne County Municipal Court judge sentenced him to 12 months of probation and 90 days under GPS monitoring, according to Fox 8 reporting from court and police records.
A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but allows the court to enter a conviction.
The driver whose vehicle was tracked without her knowledge or consent is the central figure in this case. Her name was redacted in court documents described by the reporting.
How It Unfolded
A delivery driver’s discovery at a Walmart stop in June 2026 set off the chain of events that led to Kubasta’s conviction.
A delivery driver found a GPS tracker attached to her vehicle in June 2026 while making a Pokémon card delivery to a Walmart location in Wooster, Ohio, according to Fox 8. She reported it to Wooster police, who arrested Kubasta after records indicated he admitted placing the device there to determine where and when Pokémon card shipments were arriving.
The device was identified in reporting by Dexerto as a Spytec GPS tracker, a consumer product that transmits location data through a connected smartphone application. That kind of tracker can give a remote user near-real-time visibility into a driver’s stops, routes, and delivery patterns without the tracked person ever knowing.
The Legal Outcome
Ohio law treats unauthorized vehicle tracking as a criminal offense, and Kubasta’s sentence reflects the technology he chose to misuse.
His sentence, per Fox 8 reporting from court records, is 12 months of probation including 90 days monitored by the same category of technology he used to track the driver.
Ohio Revised Code Section 2903.216 prohibits knowingly installing a tracking device on another person’s property, or using one to follow another person or their property, without consent. The standard violation is classified as a first-degree misdemeanor, though the statute notes that aggravated circumstances can produce different consequences.
Why This Case Reaches Beyond Wooster
The Kubasta case is a concrete example of how accessible consumer hardware can be turned into a surveillance tool against workers who never consented to monitoring.
Consumer GPS trackers are widely available and paired with smartphone apps that make vehicle surveillance straightforward to set up. Mere possession of such a device is not what Ohio’s statute prohibits. Attaching one to another person’s vehicle without consent is.
Delivery workers whose routes are regularly scheduled face a potential vulnerability: a small device placed beneath a vehicle or inside a wheel well may go unnoticed for extended periods. The Kubasta case illustrates how that vulnerability can be exploited to obtain an advantage in locating Pokémon-card deliveries.
The broader concern about covert GPS tracking is not new. Apple’s AirTag drew serious scrutiny after its 2021 launch when reports emerged of the devices being used to secretly tracking users and vehicles without consent. Apple and Google subsequently developed an industry specification for unwanted-tracking alerts, with Apple implementing it in iOS 17.5 and Google extending it to Android 6.0 and later, according to a May 2024 Apple announcement. Those protections are primarily designed for compatible Bluetooth location trackers and do not necessarily detect standalone cellular GPS devices such as the one described in this case.
The available reporting does not fully document Kubasta’s resale activity. Some secondary reports describe him as a scalper. The police and court records described by the reporting characterize him as a collector whose stated purpose was following Pokémon card deliveries.
Ordinary purchasing of limited-release products is not what this statute addresses. Placing surveillance hardware on a worker’s vehicle to gain that access is precisely what it prohibits.
The Kubasta case reinforces a principle that applies across consumer tracking products. The legality of owning a device and the legality of how it is used are two entirely separate questions.
