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Resellers achieve significant discounts on LLM API pricing by abusing free trials, proxying through unprotected support bots, and using stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks, mostly operating in China.
The relay market is primarily based in China, where resellers exploit free trials, unprotected support bots, stolen credit cards, and chargebacks to offer steep discounts. ✦ AI generated
Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-26 · original ↗
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.
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- ·Resellers offer LLM proxies with steep discounts on API pricing
- ·Market is primarily based in China
- ·Abusing free trial tiers for unlimited access
- ·Proxying through unprotected support bots
- ·Stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks
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Mechanism · 2
A secondary market for reselling LLM tokens at a discount has grown up around pooling API keys from various sources.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 90%Black market token resellers inflate reported token usage (charging multiple times the actual spend), so the $8 'deal' effectively becomes more expensive than legitimate Claude credits.Wes · Syntax · conf 70%
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provides context → The proxy software used by token resellers is open source — primarily one-api and its fork new-api — both legitimate API proxy products for load balancing across API credentials.Author · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → Buyers in this market seek cheap tokens, want to bypass geo-restrictions, and in some cases collect data for model distillation.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog