Inside the Relay Market Fueling Token Resellers and Fraud

Matt Lenhart conducted an investigation into the discount LLM token resale market, which is primarily based in China. Resellers provide access to LLM proxies, offering significant discounts on standard API prices by abusing free trials, proxying through unsecured supported bots, as well as 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 for load balancing 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 him even more cautious when publicly deploying LLM-based applications due to fear of abuse. He calls on LLM vendors to enforce stricter limits for API keys.