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An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud

Simon Willison· ·1 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 8 views
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An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud (via) 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. 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.

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Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 50 of its stories.

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An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud (via) 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.

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison's Weblog.

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