61–70 of 149 posts
"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"?
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”.
The 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
the 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
the 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…