The seiyuu rap battle project, Hypnosis Mic, is currently doing a collaboration cafe with Tanita Cafe. In several of the cafe’s branches, they’re serving HypMic-themed menu items, as well as collaboration merchandise. Unfortunately, the collaboration ran into a bit of a controversy with its Nagaoka branch for tampering with goods sales.

It seems that staff members were getting some badges for themselves through illegal means. The cafe then conducted an investigation and found out that some members were really getting some of the badges illegally. And because of this, the Tanita Cafe released an apology online.

The cafe is selling these badges as blind packs for 540 yen. Customers will get a random badge every time they buy one. What makes these badges so desirable to fans is that four of them are “secret”. According to the report, a staff member from the Fukuoka branch used the position of shopkeeper to know which ones are the secret badges and purchased it personally. In other words, the obtaining of those rare secret badges were tampered by the staff. The statement also said that they have already removed the offending staff member from service.

In addition, the cafe has now implemented new measures so that staff cannot tamper with the product anymore. They also changed the sales staff to ensure that the incident would never happen again.