abuse prevention

An Inside Look at the Token Reseller Market

2 months ago

Token fraud is widespread in the AI token economy, with relays selling access to US models at deep discounts (e.g., $0.13 per $1 of official credit).
The relay market has four layers: card/account merchants, account pools, relays/transfer stations, and end users (developers, startups, and model distillation buyers).
Most relays run on open-source software one-api or new-api, which are legitimate but used illicitly when channels stock stolen or leaked keys.
Abuse methods include free-trial abuse, chargeback attacks, prepaid cards, open inference, and denial-of-wallet attacks to burn provider spend.
The market is mature with price-comparison sites, affiliate programs, and even daily API-key lotteries (like hvoy.ai giving away 50 $100 keys per day).
Providers can defend against abuse by raising entry costs, monitoring money and behavior, clustering accounts, and implementing spend caps and concurrency limits.
No defense is perfect; attackers adapt, so providers must make fraud expensive enough to encourage attackers to target easier victims.