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>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs. >Here
by gruez 4mo ago
>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs.
>Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude
But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoYou can use it as an API unlike the subscription.
- spindump8930 4mo ago> Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.
- Mr_Xpes 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tristanj 4mo agoIt's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass. There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.
- jiggunjer 4mo agoAnd phone number verification too? So that's 3 hurdles to jump to just get opus.
- cute_boi 4mo agofor verification you can buy phone number for $1 easily.
- LoganDark 4mo agoDoesn't ~every phone number verification service check the telephone provider and only allow from a select whitelist of residential providers?
- fragmede 4mo agoWith esim and virtual credit card services, why would that be a blocker? Who's got a landline these days?
- SXX 4mo agoYou can easily get lots of esims for $5-10 months in EU / UK or just for free.
- lello1978 4mo agoI think it is really good to start to use CAMARA GEOLOCATION for it. A fraudstear could be intercepted if is not under the MNO antenna.
- j027 4mo agoPhone verification services exist to give you a real number for the purpose of passing this kind of verification. They even have APIs for these services. They make money since they can use the same number to verify different things.
- mlmonkey 4mo agoMaybe these resellers are using stolen American credit card numbers? Reselling Claude access seems to be a nice way to launder the money.