This is more concerning to me from the perspective of being able to appear as "multiple entities" to the frontier models. My question is do the companies know and are able to detect and consolidate all these accounts as a single actor and just don't care to combat it? Or are they unable to detect this? And if they are unable to detect it wouldn't it be pretty trivial to use this to influence the model overall? I would think there's more money in using it that way.
The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
91–100 of 149 posts
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Misrepresenting or concealing important facts that constitute breach of contract is fraud.
In the example above, part of signing the contract is agreeing that your usage of the vehicles doesn’t involve reselling them. Signing that contract with intent to re-rent them is a very clear legal problem.
There are several other layers of problems. When you rent something to someone else, you are representing that you have legal standing to rent it out.
If you rent out someone else’s property after agreeing to a contract that says you cannot rent it out, you are doing some more serious misrepresenting of the key facts and your intent. It could also trigger laws about theft of services depending on the situation.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#93Don't the operators store the agent traces and resell them as training data to AI companies? Why wasn't this mentioned? Did you find any evidence of that?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#94Earlier 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…
The world bank is best quality source I could find, if you know a better source or any fact contradicting the claim India is high friction for general ease of business, that would be welcome.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#95The 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?
AI is big in GPU terms but in raw bytes the whole token economy is laughably tractable.
Case in point: OpenRouter is serving 60T tokens a week, but this is all human text and code (and cache hits!), which is almost certainly compressible enough that you could fit the whole week’s usage on a single hard drive.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#96the 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.
I mean, in a more accurate analogy, Ford would be paying for the petrol too.
Inference is expensive and Anthropic did not agree to provide inference to some random third party so that the subscriber can make a few extra bucks.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#97It'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
Not necessarily.
What OpenAI and Anthropic are selling — a flat-rate subscription with both 5-hour and weekly rate limits — is a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
They expect some customers to generate more in costs than they bring in revenue, just like some people at the all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than they pay for, but by the law of large numbers, the mean cost per customer comes out to something the labs are comfortable with.
What the resellers are doing is undermining the labs' assumptions that every person needs to eat and sleep, and hence won't use every 5-hour window to the fullest. It's the equivalent of buing the all-you-can-eat pass for one person, coming into the restaurant with three of the largest suitcases you can find, and filling them to the brim with food, which you later re-sell at much lower prices. In other words, fraud.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's mostly refunding and card fraud because "bad money drives out good" in any marketplace. It's equivalent to getting a refund on an Amazon package you received, which is why a frontier model is being sold at around 2% of the face value.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#99This 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.
> We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.
Can you elaborate how it works? Specific sequence of tokens acts as a canary?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#100One 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!
If we're going to insist on continuing to use the offensive language of "third world country", at least apply it correctly. India is not what even the most casual racist would consider "third world".