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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

vectoral.com

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Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#41

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

chasd00 wrote: post #37
phildenhoff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are we reading the same article? That's mentioned once, as a potential alternative, nested in a bulleted list of alternatives. This is not an article about credit card fraud.

This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).

It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#42

Post by ac2u »

4848488448 wrote: post #26
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

Some countries have more complexity to registering a new company than others, and perhaps it’s the establishment of a new legal entity that is an unlocker to the free credits.

I don’t know if that’s true of India or not, but I like to give comment authors the benefit of the doubt that being specific about the geography was helpful context here

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#43

Post by blfr »

How do the users know they're getting what they're paying for?

I disabled automatic downgrading/rerouting because it sometimes takes me a second to tell when the answer came from a different model than I wanted. You could easily sell Opus as Fable for a good while.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#45

Post by mlenhard »

grinich wrote: post #40

This 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. https://workos.com/radar…

I don't think device fingerprinting is the right approach here.

Client-side detection can always be sidestepped, and you need to intermediate the actual inference to get enough signals to make an accurate prediction. There are hundreds of listings for cursor tokens/credits right now.

We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#46

Post by mynegation »

__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?! It is definitely credit card fraud, and a criminal enterprise, and by any definition it is wrong. I cannot imagine a jurisdiction where this is a “mere breach of contract”.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#47

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mynegation wrote: post #46
__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 is definitely credit card fraud, and a criminal enterprise, and by any definition it is wrong. I cannot imagine a jurisdiction where this is a “mere breach of contract”.

Where are you getting the idea that the cards are stolen? Sure it's mentioned that some of them likely are, but there's no reason to believe that that's most of them or that the fact that they're stolen has anything to do with the way this market functions.

This is about controlling who gets to use the tokens for what, not about payment fraud.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#48

Post by jonfromsf »

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"?

These aren't stolen credit cards. This hack works by maxing out subscription limits of the Anthropic/OpenAI plans, so you never pay additional API fees. It's fraud but not theft.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#49

Post by SyneRyder »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #5
mlenhard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I should probably clean this up. The sentence is a bit hard to understand. What I was trying to show was the steep discounts offered by resellers.

So $1 of usage for $0.13?

That sounds entirely plausible. When I was on the Claude Max $100 plan, I would often get the equivalent of at least $1300 API usage, according to the costs counter in Claude Code. That would be about $1 of usage for every $0.075c.

At $1 of usage for $0.13, the reseller is making a tidy profit on top of whatever subscriptions they're reselling.

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