This is pretty fascinating!
Here are the two open source proxies listed in the article: https://github.com/songquanpeng/one-api and https://github.com/QuantumNous/new-api
The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
51–60 of 149 posts
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#52"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.
It’s pretty clearly theft of services as generally defined in most places. It’s a hack in the same sense that rolling back your electric meter is a hack.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#53wow. Ai providers can't solve fraud 101 with their oh-so-dangerous-if-released-models?
i think this alone is the biggest bear signal
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#54How 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.
You can't, it's all reputation based. Similar to whether drug users don't really know what they got were diluted or not.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#55It's the same fundamental problem as "ticket touting" for popular events - if you sell something that's in demand at a price that's far lower than the clearing price of the market, you're creating a juicy arbitrage opportunity that sooner or later somebody is going to try and exploit
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#56The 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…
The abuse is factored in to pricing and quota structure.
I have some past experience with subscription plans for a much less interesting product. Abuse is inevitable. As you do your math on the subscription costs you look at the actual usage across all accounts, which includes the abuse.
Cleaning up abuse was still a priority because it meant we could give more service to the real customers. It's a frustrating battle because you actually want to give good service to the real customers, but you also want to let each account do as they please with their susbcription. That latter priority probably fades fast for something like an LLM company when you discover that the abuse has become automated and is scaling up so fast that it's tilting the math toward degrading service for everyone.
> Fixed cost per token simply works.
As a consumer, I benefit greatly from the subscription rates. There's a lot of grumbling about how they should go to fixed token for everyone but I'm over hear happy with the subscription plan offerings while they last.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#57Seems to be an LLM megaexpansion of the actual source (in chinese): https://www.v2ex.com/t/1196011
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#58the way i see it there are 3 types of resellers. the ones using fake credit cards to rack up costs and then cancel the card are doing actual fraud. then you got mass free trial abuse which is more of a gray area and i would say its still wrong. but if you sign up for a subscription, pay for it and resell your monthly tokens thats not at all unethical, even if its breaking their terms and costing the provider money.
imagine ford starts renting out company cars at a huge discount so they can get people to buy the same model for themselves after they drive it at work. its the exact same car and costs the same amount to make, they just take a loss on it and use by anyone other than employees is banned in the contract.
some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud? it costs ford nothing because they get the same payments either way, they just lose potential profits. they are the ones who decided to set up a loss leader and take the risk of someone "abusing" the system so we dont need to use public resources to defend their strategy. that wastes taxpayer money to protect corporate profits, and it creates moral hazard because ford (anthropic) is not the one paying for enforcement.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#59the way i see it there are 3 types of resellers. the ones using fake credit cards to rack up costs and then cancel the card are doing actual fraud. then you got mass free trial abuse which is more of a gray area and i would say its still wrong. but if you sign up for a subscription, pay for it and resell your monthly tokens thats not at all unethical, even if its breaking their terms and costing the provider money. i…
[deleted]
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
India is very bureaucratic and slow for starting a new business new entity. It ranked 63rd on the most recent world bank survey of 2020[1], and it is even more painful to close one.
[1 ]https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/130...