What happened with the Chagee anniversary said coffee card event?
Chagee launched its seventh-anniversary campaign on November 16, promising 700,000 free drinks over seven days, along with an AR cup-clinking card-collection challenge for a year of free drinks. Users reported black screens, failed AI recognition and lost scanning attempts, and some found that scanning feet, tissues, books or trash cans still registered as a successful cup clink.
The card challenge had the lowest barrier to entry: members got seven scans per day until November 20 and needed seven cards to enter the draw. Because the mini-program relies on AI recognition, any two drinks in one frame counted as a clink, and users shared guides and universal images to raise their pass rate. The official response called it fun and avoided the loophole questions.
Chagee launched its seventh-anniversary celebration with the campaign "Good Friends Always Together," giving away 700,000 free cups over seven consecutive days and rolling out activities such as a cup-clinking card-collection challenge for a year of free drinks. The campaign stayed hugely popular with many participants, but it was followed by a string of technical problems: black screens on the scanning page, AI recognition failures, abnormal consumption of attempts, and more, triggering a flood of complaints. Surprisingly, netizens found that scanning feet, tissues, books, and even trash cans could all be judged by the AI as a successful cup clink. Faced with the skepticism, the official response was only that it was "to add fun," while dodging questions about the loopholes.
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On November 16, Chagee officially kicked off its seventh-anniversary celebration, shouting the slogan "Good Friends Always Together," planning to give away 700,000 free drinks over seven consecutive days, and also launching interactive activities such as a cup-clinking card-collection challenge for a year of free drinks and offline singing of a birthday song to guaranteed free drinks.
Among the many activities, the card-collection free-drink challenge had the lowest barrier to entry. Users only needed to open the Chagee mini-program and use the AR scanning function to capture a "red and blue cups clinking" scene to randomly draw a good-friend card; collecting 7 cards would put them in the draw (members had 7 scanning chances per day, until November 20), so it had the most participants.
On social platforms, many netizens who had already collected all the cards posted their own guides. Because the mini-program relies on AI recognition, as long as any two drinks are placed together in the same frame, the system will judge it as a "successful cup clink." To improve the pass rate, some even compiled multiple "universal images" to help everyone collect cards quickly.
However, as Chagee's anniversary celebration continued to gain热度, more and more people joined the card collection, and the brand also received a large amount of negative feedback on social platforms. First the scanning page could not open, then scans produced no results, and there were also problems such as limited scanning attempts; various bugs came one after another.
Many users reported that after entering the Chagee mini-program, they authorized the camera and clicked "Scan Now to Collect Cards" as prompted, only to find the screen completely black, followed by an error message. They then followed the official tutorial to restart their phones and exit and refresh, but the screen remained black, making it impossible to proceed to the next step.
In response, users who successfully collected cards guessed it might be a phone model or system compatibility issue, but netizens in the comments who had personally tested it with different phones and different accounts said "this bug isn't that simple." Although a large number of users tagged Chagee online to complain, the official side never responded or provided an effective solution, and everyone could only consider themselves unlucky.
Another netizen said that although she successfully opened the scanning page, she was ultimately "stuck" by the mini-program's AI and kept scanning the "universal image" hard but still could not pass. But when she was about to give up, she accidentally scanned her own feet, and the screen showed a successful cup clink; after a few tries, she collected all the cards in no time. Realizing what had happened, she quickly posted to tell everyone this trick: "Take off your socks and point the camera directly at your feet, trust me."
In fact, besides photographing feet, clever netizens also tried out various "strange poses" that could trigger a successful cup clink, such as red and blue overlapping quilts, making a V sign at the camera, two packs of tissues placed together, an open book, a cup of Nayuki, two packs of snacks... Even a trash can wrapped in a red plastic bag successfully passed the AI's "keen eye."
In addition, some people also mentioned that although there were clearly 7 scanning chances each day, on the 6th time the system told them all attempts had been used up, yet trying again the next day gave the same result, so it was hard not to suspect this was another strange bug.
In response, some media consulted Chagee's online customer service, which responded that this was to increase the fun of the activity and also to let users exercise creativity and imagination, but it ignored questions about loopholes in the activity.
Image source: online screenshots
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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
