Inside the Resell Market Fueling Token Scalpers and Scammers
An investigation by Matt Lenhart uncovered a market for discounted LLM token resale, operating largely from China. Resellers exploit free trials, unsecured chatbot backends, stolen credit cards, and chargeback attacks. The proxy software relies on open-source projects one-api and new-api.
Matt Lenhart investigated the secondary market for discounted LLM tokens, which is primarily based in China. Resellers provide access to LLM proxies, offering significant discounts on standard API prices by exploiting free trials, proxying through unsecured supported bots, and using stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks. The proxy software used is open-source—mainly one-api and its more actively developed fork new-api, both legitimate API proxy products that can be used to balance requests across a pool of credentials. Buyers seek cheap tokens, aim to bypass geographic restrictions, and in some cases collect data for model distillation. The article's author notes that the existence of this market makes them even more cautious when publicly deploying LLM-based applications due to fear of abuse. They urge LLM vendors to improve strict limits on API keys.
Source: Simon Willison —
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