Shanghai police recently disclosed that they had solved a case involving the resale of queue numbers for a popular sushi restaurant by exploiting vulnerabilities in its ticketing system, arresting one individual involved.
It is reported that in September this year, Shanghai police received reports from catering businesses in their jurisdiction stating that their stores frequently experienced situations where online queue slots were snapped up in large quantities as soon as they opened.
Over the past month, more than 30 stores have experienced over 50,000 "empty" queue numbers, seriously disrupting the normal operational order of their restaurants.
Staff at the sushi restaurant reported that as soon as they opened, the online queue system showed hundreds of people already waiting. Even more unusually, the numbers on the display kept rolling, but no one responded to their called number to enter and dine, resulting in a large number of skipped turns.
Police investigations revealed that a batch of seller accounts appeared on second-hand platforms, all selling queue numbers for this store at around 15 yuan each. The product descriptions and phrasing were largely identical, suggesting they were operated by the same person.
Further investigation found that these accounts were all operated by a man named Lei, who was considered a major suspect. On September 29, police successfully arrested suspect Lei.
According to Lei's confession, since August 2026, he used technical means to crack the store's queue system to earn extra money, illegally obtaining over 50,000 queue numbers, which he then sold on internet platforms for profit, making an illegal gain of over 10,000 yuan.
Currently, suspect Lei has been criminally detained by police for suspected illegal control of computer information systems, and the case is under further investigation.