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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#32[flagged]
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#33Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#34One 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
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Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#35I spent years working on financial integrity at a large ads company and this isn't novel at all! The same resale markets are at play for the last generation of internet giant's products. Highly sophisticated actors, able to cobble together impressions through abuse of the billing systems, stolen financial instruments, taken over accounts, etc, create massive markets of discounted impressions for resale. It was very interesting to compete against them as we hardened our defenses and they invented new ways to exploit them. I imagine the same defensive tools and techniques are being deployed by my former colleagues who moved to the labs.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#36Earlier 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.
You’ll have to clarify who the counterparties are to this contract and where the person whose credit card was stolen fits into it.
I don't doubt that stolen cards are involved, but you could say that for anything that has to do with card-not-present transactions, e.g. Amazon retail. Is there reason to believe that it's especially prominent in this case?
I assume most of it is just people who want cheaper access to these models and don't mind subsidizing access via somebody who is simultaneously distilling the model.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The credit card and the money is what was stolen.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, theft requires that there be somebody who no longer has access. This is about too many people having access. Piracy might be a more fitting term.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#39The real problem is subscription models. Businesses want recurring revenue so they try to game the ratio of fixed subscription prices to COGS but it's always a game and so whoever can figure out the upside for the company can figure out the complementary upside for themselves. How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are aut…
> How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation. You could forbid "using tokens for the benefit of more than the human who signed up" but then what do families (especially with kids) need to do? What if your friend asks you a question and you turn to a chat model? Forbidding "reselling" tokens outside of a househol…
> You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation.
Is this some kind of attempt to make the other side look better by making the worst argument you can?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#40This is the problem we've been working on solving with WorkOS Radar. We run it for Cursor and a bunch of other AI companies who have a free trial that gives some free inference to test the product.
It turns out to be a pretty complex program to solve at scale. Token fraud is a lucrative market and the adversaries are surprisingly sophisticated. It's a cat-and-mouse game, accelerated with AI.
(If you'd like to work on this, we are hiring :))