A restaurant worker from Osaka is facing criminal charges after allegedly flooding the official store of manga publisher Shueisha with bogus orders totaling more than 4.3 billion yen, roughly $27 million, across a two-year stretch.
Mayu Yoshida, 32, was arrested August 4 on suspicion of fraudulent obstruction of business, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department confirmed. Yoshida had placed orders on more than 2,000 occasions at Shueisha's Jump Character Store starting around October 2023, never intending to complete a single purchase.
Her method was straightforward. Japan's e-commerce infrastructure allows shoppers to select convenience-store prepayment, place an order, and then let it expire unpaid, triggering an automatic cancellation. Yoshida allegedly ran that play thousands of times. She also placed more than 2,100 cash-on-delivery orders and refused the packages at the door, a tactic that sticks the seller with return shipping costs under Japanese law. In some cases she used fictitious addresses to make delivery physically impossible.
To stay under the store's radar, Yoshida allegedly created 238 separate customer accounts. Shueisha filed a complaint with police in June 2025, more than a year before the arrest.
Shueisha incurred approximately 7.5 million yen, about $47,000, in unrecoverable shipping and return fees, plus additional restocking and order-processing costs. The broader harm was operational: the flood of fake orders caused temporary stock shortages that blocked paying customers from buying items, while also straining logistics.
Yoshida, who had been a legitimate paying customer of the Jump Character Store since fall 2018, admitted to the allegations after her arrest. She told investigators she had been experiencing stress and found relief in securing limited items before they sold out.
"I felt a sense of satisfaction and refreshment from ordering items before they sold out," she said. She also said, "I generally like anime. Ordering the products gave me a sense of satisfying my desires," and added, "I do not have any resentment towards Shueisha."
