"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?
"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?
These aren't stolen credit cards. This hack works by maxing out subscription limits of the Anthropic/OpenAI plans, so you never pay additional API fees. It's fraud but not theft.
It’s pretty clearly theft of services as generally defined in most places. It’s a hack in the same sense that rolling back your electric meter is a hack.
Violation of Terms of Service is civil, not criminal, matter.
With theft, somebody ends up without an Xbox. Theft is wrong. This is mere breach of contract, whether it's wrong depends on the contract.
You’ll have to clarify who the counterparties are to this contract and where the person whose credit card was stolen fits into it.
I don't doubt that stolen cards are involved, but you could say that for anything that has to do with card-not-present transactions, e.g. Amazon retail. Is there reason to believe that it's especially prominent in this case?
I assume most of it is just people who want cheaper access to these models and don't mind subsidizing access via somebody who is simultaneously distilling the model.
What?! It is definitely credit card fraud, and a criminal enterprise, and by any definition it is wrong. I cannot imagine a jurisdiction where this is a “mere breach of contract”.
Where are you getting the idea that the cards are stolen? Sure it's mentioned that some of them likely are, but there's no reason to believe that that's most of them or that the fact that they're stolen has anything to do with the way this market functions.
This is about controlling who gets to use the tokens for what, not about payment fraud.
What?
It's not _theft_ because nothing is _stolen_. The tokens are being used in a way that breaches the contract agreed to by whomever set up the account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Kilo, Antigravity etc. but it's not theft.
Right, theft requires that there be somebody who no longer has access. This is about too many people having access. Piracy might be a more fitting term.
The credit card and the money is what was stolen.
Are we reading the same article? That's mentioned once, as a potential alternative, nested in a bulleted list of alternatives. This is not an article about credit card fraud.
This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).
It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.
Fair enough. Is the right enforcement then to ignore the "token resellers" and go after the credit card business listed at the "upstream" on his post?
one man's fraud is another man's arbitrage opportunity