A website associated to J-Pop idol phenomenon Love Stay! went up for public sale and the lead bid is a really sane $615 million

Japanese followers of the mega-franchise Love Stay!, which spans anime, manga, dwell performances, and video games, just lately noticed that the area for the official fan membership of Aqours expired and is now up at public sale. High bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million {dollars} to you, sir.

There are numerous iterations of Love Stay!, all of them being both Jpop teams or solo idols, however Aquors is arguably essentially the most wide-ranging and profitable, with over a decade’s price of video games, a number of anime seasons, and dwell performances. The official Aquors fan membership was shuttered in June 2025, which most likely explains the timing of this, and followers are fuming that Bandai Namco has let the registration lapse on this method.

After the shutdown final yr, the Aqours Membership area—lovelive-aqoursclub.jp—switched from its earlier type to show a reasonably commonplace “thanks and goodbye” message to any guests. As of Could 1 2026, nonetheless, that is modified to an public sale for the area hosted by Japanese registration service Onamae. The public sale ends on Could 27, and clearly is being gamed: both it is Love Stay followers making some extent, which appears the extra possible rationalization, or trolls having fun.

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The principle reason behind consternation amongst followers appears to be {that a} once-official area being acquired by a 3rd social gathering opens up the model and followers to malicious behaviour: this will likely appear pie-in-the-sky, however the area at present stays linked throughout many different official Love Stay! websites, together with the primary one.

Japanese information outlet ITmedia writes (thanks, Automaton): “If the area falls into the fingers of a 3rd social gathering, there’s a threat that phishing websites mimicking the official fan membership may very well be created. For the reason that area is an identical to the real one, it can’t be dominated out that such websites might bypass browser security measures or trigger password administration instruments to routinely fill in usernames and passwords.”

The Aqours fan membership ran alongside the second season of the anime specializing in this specific model of the group, and was tied-in to varied items of merch and video games round it: the previous “purchase a CD and enter this code for a yr’s free membership” kinda factor.

However I did promise you livid followers. “Is Bandai Namco silly or what?” asks AkiraReynir (through machine translation). “A idiot who discards the area lower than a yr after ending service! They’ve apparently already forgotten that their model area obtained hijacked earlier than, and that there was a sequence collab on onamae.com. Past saving.”

Eesh! The Japan DNS Operators Group has beforehand made requires “end-of-life planning” in the case of such websites: “When discontinuing a website, it’s endorsed to place it into dormancy, carry out reverse search engine marketing measures equivalent to requesting removing from search engines like google and backlink websites, and eradicating content material from archive websites, and solely decide [about abandoning the URL] after the variety of DNS queries falls beneath a predetermined ‘threshold.'”

Properly, that clearly hasn’t occurred right here: although I someway doubt Onamae are getting their $615 million. However it does show a minimum of, as PCG’s Jessica Kinghorn put it, that Love Stay followers are “merely one thing else.”