Via Yahoo! Japan News (Archive link)

On the 5th, Kura Sushi updated its official website to announce that it would cancel its ongoing “Chiikawa” collaboration campaign starting at the opening of business on the 6th. The company stated that this decision was made after an internal investigation revealed misconduct by employees in connection with the campaign. ……

It was a gacha-style campaign in which a customer won a random Chiikawa prize after ordering x amount’s worth of food. It was very popular and there were long lines at branches of this sushi chain. However, multiple customers, of different branches, complained on SNS that while they endured long wait times and then ate hundreds of dollars worth of food, getting multiple prizes, none of the prize was of the “best” tier.

Then, the discovery of a large amount of such “best” prizes being sold 2nd hand online at once from the same accounts led to suspicion of employees hand-picking and keeping them for themselves. There were also reports of prizes for the next wave being sold before the wave even began.

Cases like this happened with other companies before but in this case it seems that the rights holders got angry enough to terminate the collaboration mid-campaign.