Love Live Domain Auction Hits $615M as Fans Rage

Ninety-seven billion yen. That's the current top bid on a domain name that, until recently, hosted a polite "thank you and goodbye" message for fans of Love Live! Aqours. Converted to dollars, that's roughly $615 million for a URL that Bandai Namco apparently couldn't be bothered to renew.

The domain in question is lovelive-aqoursclub.jp, the former home of the official Aqours fan club. Aqours is one of the most successful branches of the Love Live! franchise, spanning anime, games, manga, and live performances over more than a decade. The fan club itself was shut down in June 2025, and as of May 1 2026, the domain flipped from its farewell page to an active auction listing on Onamae, a Japanese domain registration service. The auction runs until May 27.

Nobody is actually paying $615 million for this. The bidding is almost certainly being driven by fans making a very loud point, or trolls having fun, or both. But the absurd number on the screen isn't really the story here.

The Actual Problem

What has Love Live! fans angry is the security risk. The expired domain is still linked across multiple official Love Live! websites, including the franchise's main page. As Japanese outlet ITmedia reported, if a third party acquires the domain, it could be used to create phishing sites that mimic the old fan club. Because the URL is identical to the legitimate one, browser security features and password managers might not catch the difference. Usernames and passwords could autofill on a fake site without users realising anything is wrong.

This isn't a theoretical concern. One fan, AkiraReynir, put it bluntly in a post translated from Japanese: "Is Bandai Namco stupid or what? A fool who discards the domain less than a year after ending service! They've apparently already forgotten that their brand domain got hijacked before, and that there was a series collab on onamae.com. Beyond saving."

I don't think that's an overreaction. Letting a branded domain lapse when it's still linked from your own active websites is negligent, full stop. It's the kind of oversight that would get someone fired in most industries, and the fact that this is a franchise with a massive, engaged fanbase makes it worse, not better. These are exactly the users most likely to click an old bookmark or follow a link from an official page without thinking twice.

The Japan DNS Operators Group has previously published guidance on exactly this scenario, recommending that companies put discontinued domains into dormancy, request removal from search engines and backlink sites, strip content from web archives, and only abandon a domain after DNS query volume drops below a set threshold. None of that appears to have happened here. Bandai Namco seemingly let the registration lapse and walked away.

What makes the whole thing sting is that this was entirely preventable. Domain renewals cost almost nothing. Even if Bandai Namco had no plans to ever reuse the Aqours Club branding, holding onto the domain for a few more years while cleaning up inbound links would have been basic digital hygiene. Instead, the company left a door open that leads directly to its most loyal customers.

The $615 million bid will expire or get reset. Nobody's writing that cheque. But the auction itself has done its job as a signal flare, drawing attention to a lapse that could have quietly become a real problem if fans hadn't noticed first. Bandai Namco hasn't publicly commented on the situation, and the domain remains live on Onamae with the auction closing on May 27.