Love Live! fans are raising alarm after the former official domain for Aqours Club, the fan club tied to Love Live! Sunshine!! idol group Aqours, appeared to go up for auction in Japan.
The domain in question is lovelive-aqoursclub.jp. Aqours Club officially closed in June 2025, and for a while the site simply showed a farewell message with the fan club’s logo. But from May 1, visitors have reportedly been redirected to an auction page run by Japanese domain registration service Onamae.
The auction is scheduled to run until May 27, and the current top bid has reportedly climbed to 97.11 billion yen, or more than US$615 million. Ya, that number is absolutely ridiculous. Most fans suspect the bidding is not serious and may involve fake bids or trolling, because nobody sane is paying blockbuster movie budget money for an expired fan club domain.
Still, the money is not really the scary part. The bigger concern is what happens if the domain ends up with someone malicious.
For anime fans, official domains carry trust. If you were an Aqours Club member before, seeing that familiar URL in an email or browser could make you lower your guard. Japanese outlet ITmedia highlighted the risk clearly: a third party could use the same domain to build a fake fan club login page, run phishing campaigns, or potentially trick password managers and browsers because the URL itself is the original one.
That is why fans are upset at Bandai Namco and the official Love Live! side. The frustration is not just nostalgia. It is the feeling that an official brand asset was allowed to slip away barely a year after the fan club shut down.
One fan on X said they had been an Aqours Club member since launch and felt genuinely sad seeing the situation unfold. Their worry was simple: if someone sent an email using an address connected to @lovelive-aqoursclub.jp, it would look believable enough that even longtime fans might open it. They argued the official team should take responsibility and recover the domain, especially when keeping it would likely have cost far less than the damage caused by a scam.
There is also precedent for things getting ugly. Fans pointed to rilakkuma-tomonokai.jp, a domain previously connected to the official Rilakkuma brand. It is now reportedly controlled by a third party and appears to be hosting pirated sexually explicit manga. For a family-friendly or idol franchise, that kind of domain afterlife is nightmare fuel.
For Malaysian and SEA Love Live! fans, this is a useful reminder: do not assume an old official-looking link is still safe. This region has plenty of anime communities, merch buyers, event-goers, and fan club veterans who follow Japanese franchises closely. If a scam page ever targets overseas fans with fake memberships, limited goods, or login prompts, the damage could spread beyond Japan very quickly.
The safest move for now is simple. If you receive any message involving Aqours Club, check official Love Live! channels first. Do not log in through old bookmarks, and do not trust emails just because the domain looks familiar. Password managers are helpful, but they are not magic shields when an original domain changes hands.
This whole saga is a very 2026 internet problem: anime fandom, brand management, cybersecurity, and troll bidding all smashed together. Hopefully the official side steps in before the domain becomes something worse than an embarrassing auction page.
Source: Automaton Media