They seem highly suspicious to me. I've been looking at whatever I could see (seems like roughly only flights departing in the next 8 hours or so), and so many lists have very few (often zero) people on them (while others have tons). For example, right now looking at LAX --> JFK flights, focusing just on business class upgrades (understandably there are few people on the lists to upgrade from business to first):

• the flight departing in 30 minutes: 6 people on the list
• ~2 hours: 1 person
• ~3 hours: 0 people
• ~6 hours: 3 people

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this means that there is a total of one person sitting in economy that has any kind of status with AA on the 2nd and 3rd flights combined - is that likely/possible? I realize that there are not many coach seats on this flight, but this still seems impossibly low. And in past days, there were many fewer people overall. One day 4 or 5 days ago every single flight from LAX to JFK and JFK to LAX had zero passengers on the waitlist.

Are these reliable? Is there something I'm missing - e.g. are people removed from the waitlist once they are upgraded or once they know that they are not getting upgraded? I'm more used to United's list where there will be ~50 people on the upgrade list and you'll see that the first few will have been given a seat.