An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud
An investigation by Matt Lenhard reveals a market for reselling LLM tokens at a discount, primarily in China. Resellers abuse free trials, unprotected support bots, stolen credit cards, or chargeback attacks to offer cheap API proxies. The software used is open-source, mainly one-api and its fork new-api. Buyers seek cheap tokens, avoid geo-restrictions, or collect data for model distillation. The existence of this ecosystem makes developers more cautious about exposing LLM applications publicly.
Developers face increased risk of token theft from a thriving reseller ecosystem exploiting unprotected endpoints.


