Inside the token relay market: how resellers slash API costs to 97.8% off

An Inside Look at the Token Reseller Market

Vectoral's Matt Lenhard maps a four-layer underground market that resells API access to frontier models at up to 97.8% off list price. Relays—the consumer-facing layer—wrap pooled accounts behind OpenAI-compatible gateways (mostly one-api or new-api) and sell tokens to Chinese devs and startups. Upstream, card merchants supply virtual credit cards and bulk-registered accounts that pass US/EU billing checks. Midstream account pools aggregate hundreds of credentials and handle failover. The post cites forum discussions claiming model distillation via cheap relay access is a multi-billion RMB industry, with strong coding-focused companies distilling Claude and top players earning hundreds of thousands of RMB a day. Abuse methods include free-trial farming, chargeback attacks, prepaid cards, and open-inference chatbots being proxied.

Why it matters: A well-sourced breakdown of the token relay underground — four-layer stack, carder account pools, and a 2.2% price floor — that goes well beyond generic security awareness. Held below 85 because it's a risk-intel piece for ops/sec teams rather than an actionable product or mod...