the way i see it there are 3 types of resellers. the ones using fake credit cards to rack up costs and then cancel the card are doing actual fraud. then you got mass free trial abuse which is more of a gray area and i would say its still wrong. but if you sign up for a subscription, pay for it and resell your monthly tokens thats not at all unethical, even if its breaking their terms and costing the provider money.
imagine ford starts renting out company cars at a huge discount so they can get people to buy the same model for themselves after they drive it at work. its the exact same car and costs the same amount to make, they just take a loss on it and use by anyone other than employees is banned in the contract.
some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud? it costs ford nothing because they get the same payments either way, they just lose potential profits. they are the ones who decided to set up a loss leader and take the risk of someone "abusing" the system so we dont need to use public resources to defend their strategy. that wastes taxpayer money to protect corporate profits, and it creates moral hazard because ford (anthropic) is not the one paying for enforcement.
Selling your sub tokens is against ToS and somewhat like sharing your gym pass.
> some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud?
Most likely, yes.
There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who can drive them and for what purposes.
Some people see these limitations and scream "Not fair! They paid money, they can do whatever they want!" The misunderstanding is that the price they paid was predicated on the specific use. They got a lower price for the rentals because the provider calculated the expected use case and priced it according to that.
If the small company starts renting out the cars to try to maximize how much they're used, that breaks the financial model. That's why this type of use is forbidden in every basic rental contract.
It's the same reason why you can't rent an apartment building and then turn it into an AirBnB. On a smaller scale, it's why you can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and load up on food to carry outside to your 5 hungry friends. This type of pricing is everywhere.
There is a vocal online minority who believe user license agreements shouldn't be enforced and individuals should never be considered accountable for following them, but that doesn't even apply to these resellers. This isn't a lowly individual user trying to get back $10 from their $20 per month plan that was going unused. There's no way to even achieve the scale and discounts without mass, automated fraud. They're doing chargeback fraud or using stolen credit cards.
It's not even a crime where the big corporation is the only victim. The higher the volume of fraud on the subscription accounts, the less real usage you and I get for our dollar. These people are jumping on the accounts targeted to individuals like us and abusing them to sell tokens to big corporations trying to abuse them at scale. People like you and I lose when these accounts get their limits reduced or the companies start introducing ID checks and KYC just to use basic services.
Breach of contract isn't fraud though
Misrepresenting or concealing important facts that constitute breach of contract is fraud.
In the example above, part of signing the contract is agreeing that your usage of the vehicles doesn’t involve reselling them. Signing that contract with intent to re-rent them is a very clear legal problem.
There are several other layers of problems. When you rent something to someone else, you are representing that you have legal standing to rent it out.
If you rent out someone else’s property after agreeing to a contract that says you cannot rent it out, you are doing some more serious misrepresenting of the key facts and your intent. It could also trigger laws about theft of services depending on the situation.
Not every breach of contract is fraud, but signing a contract when you never intended to fulfill your side of the bargain is. For example, if someone signs a contract with a seller, pays them, and the seller disappears, they were defrauded. Or agreeing not to resell something and then doing it anyway.
Instead of credit card, prepaid stablecoin purchases would solve the problem. No chargebacks.
Or a more pedestrian debit card.