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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

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Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#21

Post by namanyayg »

One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers.

I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all.

Primarily that operated because registering a new company getting free AWS credits was a very tiny cost

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#22

Post by zht »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #19
altmanaltman wrote: post #15

"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?

With theft, somebody ends up without an Xbox. Theft is wrong. This is mere breach of contract, whether it's wrong depends on the contract.

What?

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#23

Post by jfim »

bg24 wrote: post #20

Nice research and structuring into 4-tier layer. For providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, subscription is the entry point for all these, right? Besides the measures proposed in the article, can token usage % determine these clusters of accounts?

There are probably various metrics like language used to prompt the model, number of hours per day spent prompting, and many others.

There are quite a few other mitigations that could be done by providers that aren't mentioned in the article.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#24

Post by mlenhard »

namanyayg wrote: post #21

One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…

I was going to cover this in a follow-up article, but yeah, there are network of token brokers who buy unused credits from startups and then resell them.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#25

Post by selectodude »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #19
altmanaltman wrote: post #15

"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?

With theft, somebody ends up without an Xbox. Theft is wrong. This is mere breach of contract, whether it's wrong depends on the contract.

You’ll have to clarify who the counterparties are to this contract and where the person whose credit card was stolen fits into it.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#26

Post by 4848488448 »

namanyayg wrote: post #21

One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…

the in India wasnt even needed no worries

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#28

Post by kristjansson »

mmoskal wrote: post #12
robluxus wrote: post #2

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent. Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

Also 425 RMB is about $59 so $1 of tokens for $0.017 not $0.13 (the discount rate quoted also seems off).

seems like they missed a zero somewhere. its a dollar of usage for a penny and change.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#29

Post by juleiie »

namanyayg wrote: post #21

One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…

Video influence pipelines from India huh?

No wonder social media is so shit nowadays. All that brainwashing and propaganda from third world countries, now at 4% the price!

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#30

Post by phildenhoff »

zht wrote: post #22
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With theft, somebody ends up without an Xbox. Theft is wrong. This is mere breach of contract, whether it's wrong depends on the contract.

What?

It's not _theft_ because nothing is _stolen_. The tokens are being used in a way that breaches the contract agreed to by whomever set up the account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Kilo, Antigravity etc. but it's not theft.
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