An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud
Simon Willison Simon Willison
A market has emerged in China where resellers offer discounted access to large language model APIs by pooling credentials from free trials, unprotected support bots, and sometimes stolen payment methods. Token resellers use open-source proxy software like one-api and new-api to bundle API access and undercut official pricing, while buyers seek cheap tokens, bypass geographic restrictions, or harvest data for model distillation. The ecosystem creates financial risk for LLM providers and developers, highlighting the need for better spending caps and rate limiting on API keys.
Why it matters
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources. This looks to be mostly a thing in China. Resellers sell access to an LLM proxy that offers significant discounts on regular API pricing, which they achieve by abusing free trials, proxying through unprotected support bots, or sometimes through stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks. The software they are using for these proxies is open source - mostly one-api and its more actively developed fork new-api, both legitimate API proxy products which can be used to load. balance requests across a pool of API credentials. The buyers are seeking cheap tokens, avoiding geo-restrictions, and in some cases collecting data for model distillation. I've been cautious about exposing my own LLM-driven applications publicly out of fear of abuse leading to big token bills.
