The relays sound also like a nice source of monitoring for whoever controls them.
Its so much stuff going through them, how would they monitor it all?
The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#72This article is about the mechanics, but the title implies this is unethical. Why is this practice considered unethical?
Is it ethical?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#73The 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…
Tokens are becoming a hard commodity. Subscriptions don’t work with hard commodities. Subscriptions work fine where fixed costs/capital investment are massive and service delivery is negligible. Think car washes and Netflix. The marginal cost of adding an additional subscriber to a streaming platform or a monthly car was membership is negligible. While there was substantial capital investment to generate the models, we are learning that the service delivery cost of tokens is real.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#74the 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…
> 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?
Most likely, yes.
There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who can drive them and for what purposes.
Some people see these limitations and scream "Not fair! They paid money, they can do whatever they want!" The misunderstanding is that the price they paid was predicated on the specific use. They got a lower price for the rentals because the provider calculated the expected use case and priced it according to that.
If the small company starts renting out the cars to try to maximize how much they're used, that breaks the financial model. That's why this type of use is forbidden in every basic rental contract.
It's the same reason why you can't rent an apartment building and then turn it into an AirBnB. On a smaller scale, it's why you can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and load up on food to carry outside to your 5 hungry friends. This type of pricing is everywhere.
There is a vocal online minority who believe user license agreements shouldn't be enforced and individuals should never be considered accountable for following them, but that doesn't even apply to these resellers. This isn't a lowly individual user trying to get back $10 from their $20 per month plan that was going unused. There's no way to even achieve the scale and discounts without mass, automated fraud. They're doing chargeback fraud or using stolen credit cards.
It's not even a crime where the big corporation is the only victim. The higher the volume of fraud on the subscription accounts, the less real usage you and I get for our dollar. These people are jumping on the accounts targeted to individuals like us and abusing them to sell tokens to big corporations trying to abuse them at scale. People like you and I lose when these accounts get their limits reduced or the companies start introducing ID checks and KYC just to use basic services.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#75How do you know the reseller is even giving you the genuine article? Could they be advertising Fable but repacking Deepseek?
About the same way you'd know Anthropic is getting you the model you picked. Which to me is not really obvious, given clear differences in quality throughout the day and month
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#76How do we define "fraud" if taking a new user discount over and over is fraud?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
So that report was discontinued after relatively proven statistical gaming and interference by several countries, doesn’t exist post 2020. Post 2020 SPICE+ launched making registration trivially fast. However really the trick isn’t creating and closing companies, it’s that the fact majority of reporting that would catch scam companies like these just get ignored and gather small civil penalties payable years later or…
What's the scam? Generally a country's governance system wouldn't get involved in a dispute this trivial between a foreign company and an individual.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#78the 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…
> 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? Most likely, yes. There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who ca…
Breach of contract isn't fraud though
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#79the 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…
Instead of credit card, prepaid stablecoin purchases would solve the problem. No chargebacks.
Or a more pedestrian debit card.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#80How 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.
I think the drug users will know before the Opus users.